Discovering Evangelical Episcopalians

If you type the phrase ‘Evangelicals in the Episcopal Church’ into your search engine, this blog comes up at the No 2 position; type ‘Evangelical Episcopalians’ and it’s number 8—which is quite a bit higher than a few weeks ago, for some reason. No 1 is the site for ‘Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches’ on Wikipedia, which describes a denomination started by some charismatic Episcopalians in the 1990s. Anything in a Wikipedia article always comes up No 1, I think because the biggest search engine, Google, has a financial stake in the Wikipedia service.

The rest of the sites returned by the search are not connected to the Episcopal Church. They are mostly old blog posts by people who are now members of various break-away ‘Anglican’ groups. In other words, this site is the only one that an interested person will find that deals with evangelicalism as it still survives in the Episcopal Church.

I guess we’d better get to work on a Wikipedia page…

 

Puritan Stock

Tomorrow is commencement at Harvard. Their commencement hymn, which I believe they still sing, assumes those who have studied there have ‘deepen’d the streams/That make glad the fair city of God’, and prays ‘Let not moss-covered error moor thee at its side/ As the world on truth’s current glides by’, and urges the graduates to ‘Be the herald of light, and the bearer of love,/Till the stock of the Puritans die.’

No doubt many of the graduates hold fast to the biblical principles which guided those who founded the school, but they didn’t learn them there, and nor did anyone who came there without having learned them. (‘There’ being the institution itself; no doubt there are some wonderful campus ministries and local churches bringing students to faith.) As far as Harvard is concerned, the stock of the Puritans is already dead.

John Harvard was a Church of England clergyman, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, founded during the English Reformation for the express purpose of training preachers. He took 400 books with him when he sailed for Massachusetts, and served briefly as a minister at Charlestown. He died of consumption after only a year in the new world, leaving his books and half of his capital to the school being organised not far away. Since that bequest tripled the seed money for the proposed college, it was named after him.

In 1638, the year of his death, many of its clergy, even those serving in the plantations, still hoped that the Church of England would complete or return to its reformation, depending on how they read the history, Emmanuel graduates especially. It is those who still have that hope for the Church of England’s daughter in the new world that are Harvard stock, and they are not dead.

 

An Evangelical Looks at Hieronymus Bosch

A Wheaton student comments on Bosch’s Carrying the Cross—’outdoes many textual commentaries on Hieronymus Bosch’. Check it out here. Comment there rather than here, or best of all there and here…

 

Sola Scriptura

From time to time Anglicans make claims about the early church in support of one or other of the various churchmanships we ‘enjoy’. Even Peter Toon, an Evangelical from the C of E who taught for a while at Nashotah House (a short while, as you might expect), was fond of referring to ‘One God, two Testaments, three Creeds, four Councils, five centuries’ as providing the standard to which the church should be held accountable in its teaching and practice.

It won’t do, you know. ‘From the first of the fathers to the last of the popes, a succession of bishops, of saints, of martyrs, and of miracles, is continued without interruption; and the progress of superstition was so gradual, and almost imperceptible, that we know not in what particular link we should break the chain of tradition. Every age bears testimony to the wonderful events by which it was distinguished, and its testimony appears no less weighty and respectable than that of the preceding generation, till we are insensibly led on to accuse our own inconsistency, if in the eighth or in the twelfth century we deny to the venerable Bede, or to the holy Bernard, the same degree of confidence which, in the second century, we had so liberally granted to Justin or to Irenæus.’

Our Articles of Religion make it very clear that there is only one authority on which we can rely, and that is the authority of Scripture. If it can’t be found there, it can’t be necessary, no matter who said it, or when. Even things ordained by the first four Councils ‘have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.’ Even the creeds are only to be believed because ‘they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture’.

If we were to discover a new manuscript quoting Peter, or Paul’s missing letter, it would have no more authority for us—less, actually, in the light of Romans 13—than a pastoral letter from our own bishop (although it might in some cases be a lot more interesting). To quote William Chillingworth again (from here), ‘The BIBLE. The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants! Whatsoever else they believe besides it, and the plain, irrefragable, indubitable consequences of it, well may they hold it as a matter of Opinion, but as matter of Faith and Religion, neither can they with coherence to their own grounds believe it themselves, nor require the belief of it of others.’

So why bother with anything else?

 

God and Human Nature

The best of all Church Historians, Edward Gibbon, in his inimitable style, points out an implication of God’s dealings with the Jews that I’d never noticed:

When the law was given in thunder from Mount Sinai, when the tides of the ocean and the course of the planets were suspended for the convenience of the Israelites, and when temporal rewards and punishments were the immediate consequences of their piety or disobedience, they perpetually relapsed into rebellion against the visible majesty of their Divine King, placed the idols of the nations in the sanctuary of Jehovah, and imitated every fantastic ceremony that was practised in the tents of the Arabs, or in the cities of Phoenicia. As the protection of Heaven was deservedly withdrawn from the ungrateful race, their faith acquired a proportionable degree of vigor and purity. The contemporaries of Moses and Joshua had beheld with careless indifference the most amazing miracles. Under the pressure of every calamity, the belief of those miracles has preserved the Jews of a later period from the universal contagion of idolatry; and in contradiction to every known principle of the human mind, that singular people seems to have yielded a stronger and more ready assent to the traditions of their remote ancestors, than to the evidence of their own senses.

The difference between Jewish behavior in the two different periods of history seems to be undeniable; whether it was only belief in the ancient miracles that preserved later Jewry from apostasy is debatable. It may well be that human beings are such that only when God’s discipline of us begins to seem irrevocable (as it must have done by the New Testament period) do we truly believe He is real. Perhaps the contempt increasingly being heaped on Christians will last long enough to have the same effect on us. Let’s pray that it doesn’t take something worse than contempt.

 

Confidence in the Gospel

The Evangelical Alliance in England, in which many Anglican Evangelicals there are active, has started an interesting study which you can follow on its web-site here.

It appears that while mission is clearly at the heart of what many churches are doing, talking about our faith as Christians is proving increasingly difficult. Our desire is to see churches throughout the UK have a renewed confidence in the gospel and engaged in creative evangelism which is producing lasting results. This timely campaign is not about providing busy churches with more programmes; rather it is about looking at how we can make small changes that will nurture a gospel-confident culture within our churches.

The next two years will see us travelling the length and breadth of the UK visiting places where effective evangelism is taking place – we’ll then tell you all about them, so we can all be encouraged and learn. We will be gathering thinkers and practitioners from across the evangelical spectrum to reflect critically on the gospel and its relationship with our culture. And we will be gathering a small group of churches together, to form a learning community, which will explore what steps can be taken to develop a culture of evangelism.

It might be helpful in developing a culture of evangelism among Evangelicals in the Episcopal Church.

 

Evangelical Courage

Thanks to Bruce Robison for tipping me off to this article by Pete Myers in Cross+Way. Substitute ‘Episcopal Church’ for ‘C of E’.

If we care about the gospel: we will learn to put things in perspective. If we care about people’s souls: we will learn to be winsome. If we care about the future: we will learn how to choose our battles wisely.  We must shed ourselves of the view that standing firm in the faith means clearly disassociating from error by telling everyone where they’re wrong. Such a view is ineffective. The Bible doesn’t support it. Church history doesn’t support it.  If we want to see revival in our country, we need to follow Cranmer’s example. We need evangelical courage: Courage to stick it out in the C of E. Courage to engage with the C of E structures. Courage to face reality: to be positive, befriend our opponents, and choose our battles judiciously while fighting them wisely.

Read it all here.