Today's a sad day. It's a sad day because our church voted to separate from the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). The national church has over the past 20 years stepped away from the faith once delivered to the saints, adopting a revisionist theology that cannot but destroy the future of the church.
Scripture is no longer the inspired word of God, but a cultural product (a human document that has no more of God's revelation than the Vancouver Sun newspaper). The incarnation, suffering death of Christ, and the resurrection are no longer taken literally, but they are 'metaphors that display God's unconditional love for the world'. Sin is no longer something we need to repent of and turn away from, because God is all-loving and all-forgiving; instead, sin is a an unhelpful, oppressive human construct that prevents us from self-actualization. And finally, the Easter Feast is no longer the accomplishment of God's plan in Christ before the foundation of the world, namely reconciliation with creation, but rather, it's a 'season of renewal and rebirth for all creation'. Sounds nice and warm ...
But it sounds like (among other things) a modern version of gnosticism to me.
Furthermore, Jesus is not the Son of God, but rather, he's a great man, the greatest of men who ever lived. He shows us what it means to be human. Agreed. He does indeed. He showed God and us what it means to be truly human. However, we can't leave it at that, because Christ also showed us what it means to be God. He showed us the way God deals with the world. Not so for the ACC though.
If the ACC's version of Christianity is true, why become a Christian? If Jesus didn't die/resurrect, neither will we on that final day when the New Jerusalem comes down. With such a view of Scripture, and with such a wimpy God that loves (a good thing indeed) but with no regard to holiness (hello?), God becomes like the fuzzy teddy-bear I went to sleep with as a young boy, who kept me feeling nice and warm at night, who was fun to hug, whom I could tell everything and would keep all my secrets. Like my teddy-bear, such a God does not require anything of me, because everything's just fine. God becomes a fuzzy, mushy, wimpy, and without a backbone God, made according to my own imagination, and worse yet, who caters to all my whims, desires, and tastes. Such a God is surely not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is no bobble-head smiling Jesus.
The God of the Bible is indeed loving, but he's also righteous and holy. Ask the Israelites or better yet, ask Moses, about God as a consuming fire, or ask Israel and her surrounding nations about God's righteous wrath, they might be able to tell us a few things. The revisionist God has no interest in safeguarding his righteous name and reputation. He's a washboard. And he has even less interest in transforming us into the people he's created us to be, namely, into the likeness of his Son Jesus Christ, the perfect revelation of the Father. Why? Because everyone's just fine as is.
To be a Christian in the eyes of the ACC, it seems to me, is no longer to identify with the revelation of the Triune God of the Bible, but to identify with the local "hot potato" issues of the day, always aiming to please the culture. The future of the ACC lies therefore in key words such as "tolerance" and "acceptance", depending on what our culture says, and it lies in running bingo halls (because the churches will be empty) in order to raise money to sustain ecclesiastical structures and to remain involved with the social justice issues of poverty, human rights, etc... (which, agreed, is part of the mission of the church).
On the positive side, St. John's is still a part of the Anglican Communion worldwide, because we left the ACC in order to join the province of the Southern Cone. This province, as far as I know, has remained orthodox to the faith, and has offered to accept us as a member church. The fact that we still remain a part of the global communion is, for now at least, what keeps me in the Anglican church. I'm not interested in going back to the "Free" or "Evangelical" church, and I'm even less interested in forming a new denomination.
The hard thing for me is the theological implication this break has on the church. Is the church a purely spiritual organism, or do the structures also constitute the church? To me the answer lies not in spiritualizing the church, but in joining the material and spiritual dimensions of the church. That's the unity Jesus spoke of in John 17:20-26.
I guess I'm coming to terms with the dualism and not-too-far-away gnosticism that accompanies a separation of the spiritual from the material, the sacred from the secular. I think these are false dichotomies that break the unity of God, and the unity he has in mind for both the spiritual and the material realms.
More on that another time, but as it is now, I think that churches that uphold a sacramental world view, or, traditions that hold together in balance the spiritual and the material dimensions of the cosmos, do justice to the character of God and his good creation. And of these traditions, the Orthodox Church is the example par excellence. Maybe it's time to consider a lengthy pilgrimage to the Orient.
Scripture is no longer the inspired word of God, but a cultural product (a human document that has no more of God's revelation than the Vancouver Sun newspaper). The incarnation, suffering death of Christ, and the resurrection are no longer taken literally, but they are 'metaphors that display God's unconditional love for the world'. Sin is no longer something we need to repent of and turn away from, because God is all-loving and all-forgiving; instead, sin is a an unhelpful, oppressive human construct that prevents us from self-actualization. And finally, the Easter Feast is no longer the accomplishment of God's plan in Christ before the foundation of the world, namely reconciliation with creation, but rather, it's a 'season of renewal and rebirth for all creation'. Sounds nice and warm ...
But it sounds like (among other things) a modern version of gnosticism to me.
Furthermore, Jesus is not the Son of God, but rather, he's a great man, the greatest of men who ever lived. He shows us what it means to be human. Agreed. He does indeed. He showed God and us what it means to be truly human. However, we can't leave it at that, because Christ also showed us what it means to be God. He showed us the way God deals with the world. Not so for the ACC though.
If the ACC's version of Christianity is true, why become a Christian? If Jesus didn't die/resurrect, neither will we on that final day when the New Jerusalem comes down. With such a view of Scripture, and with such a wimpy God that loves (a good thing indeed) but with no regard to holiness (hello?), God becomes like the fuzzy teddy-bear I went to sleep with as a young boy, who kept me feeling nice and warm at night, who was fun to hug, whom I could tell everything and would keep all my secrets. Like my teddy-bear, such a God does not require anything of me, because everything's just fine. God becomes a fuzzy, mushy, wimpy, and without a backbone God, made according to my own imagination, and worse yet, who caters to all my whims, desires, and tastes. Such a God is surely not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is no bobble-head smiling Jesus.
The God of the Bible is indeed loving, but he's also righteous and holy. Ask the Israelites or better yet, ask Moses, about God as a consuming fire, or ask Israel and her surrounding nations about God's righteous wrath, they might be able to tell us a few things. The revisionist God has no interest in safeguarding his righteous name and reputation. He's a washboard. And he has even less interest in transforming us into the people he's created us to be, namely, into the likeness of his Son Jesus Christ, the perfect revelation of the Father. Why? Because everyone's just fine as is.
To be a Christian in the eyes of the ACC, it seems to me, is no longer to identify with the revelation of the Triune God of the Bible, but to identify with the local "hot potato" issues of the day, always aiming to please the culture. The future of the ACC lies therefore in key words such as "tolerance" and "acceptance", depending on what our culture says, and it lies in running bingo halls (because the churches will be empty) in order to raise money to sustain ecclesiastical structures and to remain involved with the social justice issues of poverty, human rights, etc... (which, agreed, is part of the mission of the church).
On the positive side, St. John's is still a part of the Anglican Communion worldwide, because we left the ACC in order to join the province of the Southern Cone. This province, as far as I know, has remained orthodox to the faith, and has offered to accept us as a member church. The fact that we still remain a part of the global communion is, for now at least, what keeps me in the Anglican church. I'm not interested in going back to the "Free" or "Evangelical" church, and I'm even less interested in forming a new denomination.
The hard thing for me is the theological implication this break has on the church. Is the church a purely spiritual organism, or do the structures also constitute the church? To me the answer lies not in spiritualizing the church, but in joining the material and spiritual dimensions of the church. That's the unity Jesus spoke of in John 17:20-26.
I guess I'm coming to terms with the dualism and not-too-far-away gnosticism that accompanies a separation of the spiritual from the material, the sacred from the secular. I think these are false dichotomies that break the unity of God, and the unity he has in mind for both the spiritual and the material realms.
More on that another time, but as it is now, I think that churches that uphold a sacramental world view, or, traditions that hold together in balance the spiritual and the material dimensions of the cosmos, do justice to the character of God and his good creation. And of these traditions, the Orthodox Church is the example par excellence. Maybe it's time to consider a lengthy pilgrimage to the Orient.
Lord, have mercy on your Church.
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