This is actually horrifying. Remember when Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? Well, never mind that: the truth is whatever you want it to be at any point in time! You can choose your own reality! No reason to go to church or listen to some busybody priest reading from musty old book! You can just commune with Jesus on your phone! An AI will even tell you what to think so you don't have to do it yourself! Every time I think the religious environment in America can't possibly get any worse, the bar lowers still further.
Many thoughts. I may have discussed this before but it's been a while. The whole virtual service fad, which came about from Covid lockdowns (and was usually poorly done), proved to be the excuse many needed to drop out of regular attendance. My old parish was trying to stream. Many times the stream was nearly unwatchable - but I digress from the point. Anyhow, we found through analytics that few watched the live-stream. Most were watching the replay, and that not even on Sunday. Our best timeslot was Tuesday evening. I guess ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX didn't have any good shows on Tuesdays at that time. Another anecdote: we've got clergy who struggle with the lections because they haven't looked at the tables in the BCP for several years. They've got the phone app and it tells them whatever. Then they show up to a clergy retreat and embarrass themselves in front of the bishop because they are lost in the physical BCP - sometimes with the bulk of the Office and not just finding the readings.
This is one of the reasons I've tried to break my habit of using software tools like Accordance and websites like The Daily Office. They're great tools, but when overused the muscles that I use to read the actual Bible and BCP tend to atrophy. I've found that the biggest danger of reading the Bible this way is that it fractures the text -- it cuts it up into little bite-sized (or Twitter-sized) chunks and divorces the quotations from the larger context. And I found that when I habitually read the Bible in this way, I lost all sense of the narrative flow of the Bible, the larger sweep of the text, and what the German scholars call the sitz im leben. It leads to really bad exegesis to study the Bible in this way -- instead of a nice even light, you get flashbulb pops of illumination. Instead of a story, you get anecdotes. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is a single narrative that unfolds over many hundreds of years. Written by many human hands, it was written mainly by God as His revelation of himself to us. The Old Testament prophesies Christ; the Gospels celebrate Christ and allow Christ to preach; the epistles apply Christ's teaching to the Church; Revelation reveals Christ's ultimate return and reign as Lord of all creation, and the creation of a new heaven and earth. The Church cannot teach this lesson without meeting in person. Koinonia, real koinonia, happens in fellowship with flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters in Christ. We cannot take Communion or be baptised remotely; the water and the bread must touch us physically, imbue us, nourish us. When we attend services, we go not to watch a performance but to participate in a great drama (this is the beauty of the Anglican liturgy). Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, true enough, but it is when Christians are assembled together that Jesus is most present with us -- "For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them" (Matt. 18:20). You cannot be a church of one. The visible church is a fellowship, a congregation, a place where Christians work out their Sanctification as children of God.
That guy is horribly misled. There cannot be many "authentic theologies" to pick and choose from. Truth is not variable based on how one feels. Nothing about his idea is authentic Christianity; it's "Build Your Own Belief System".
There is in fact only one. But if you subscribe to the liberal* worldview, syncretization not only becomes more probable; it actually becomes inevitable. A fundamental axiom of the liberal religious worldview is that there is no such thing as absolute truth; it's all relative. Truth is positional; truth is transitory; truth is personal; truth is internal and not external. Liberals thus have no exclusionary mechanism for opposing other axiomatic belief systems (Islam, Hinduism, New Age, etc. etc.). The only possible liberal response when confronted with opposing axioms is to incorporate them into the paradigm ("everyone has some of the truth, but no one has all of it" is the shorthand view of this). The Roman Empire was a master at this: instead of smashing the local gods of every culture they conquered, they simply incorporated the local gods into their own pantheon. It made the whole machine of empire run much more smoothly. The Jews were an outlier: they insisted on the absolute primacy of their own God, and refused to worship any other, and Christians also later on. They hold to one -- and only one -- creator God who is the source and holder of all absolute Truth. God does not just speak Truth -- he is quite literally the embodiment of Truth. This is why we say that what the Bible says, God says. The Bible is God's revelation about himself to humanity. In the Judeo-Christian worldview, mankind did not seek out God; God came and found us. He presented himself to us, supernaturally, in person (theophany), through prophecy, through miracles, and finally embodied in the human person of Jesus Christ. This is Truth, and there is no hiding from it. To try and harmonize or syncretize this Truth is to abandon it entirely. Christianity "fused" with Islam or Buddhism or something else is not Christianity, but something else. It is a false Gospel and is to be rejected at the peril of one's immortal soul. There is wisdom to be found in other belief systems, to be sure, but it is simply a shadow of God which pagans can barely see. A Plato or Aristotle can almost see beyond the veil, but ultimately the truth is beyond them because they do not really know God. *Remember: I'm using "liberal" in the theological and not the political sense.
This is so obviously a spoof. A very good spoof though. So good in fact that its already taken in quite a few in here. Either that or the USA has gone completely nuts. .
In that case it seems to me that both the UK and USA should apply for political assylum somewhere. The men in the white coats do a marvelous job of explaing reality to the bewildered. I'm still convinced it's a spoof or he's a nutter. .
It’s not a spoof. It is being mischaracterized, and taken out of context (for “culture war” political reasons), on a right-wing account, but it’s not fake.
I got the assignments for our General Convention and saw I had been designated to serve as the deacon at the opening Mass. So I have dug out my deacon's training manual from 6 years ago to review the steps expected of me. Because I don't want to look like a clown who never went to any of the training seminars at the Chancery.
Don't know what everyone is worried about, it is a brilliant idea. Since downloading the app, I have cheated on my wife, soon to divorce. Will be aborting the child with the mistress and I am just leaving to house now to rob a convenience store. With only a few clicks of the button I have found the theological background to make all these so called sins just disappear. Thank you do-it-yourself religion you have lifted a great weight of my shoulders and have freed up my Sunday mornings. The YouTube channel Lutheran Satire sums it up best: Woman - She goes to one of those churches that have robes and candles but don't believe in anything. Man - Episcopalian Woman - That it.
It’s a well-intentioned concept that will probably have zero impact. Gen Z is much more resistant to the notion of organized religion than Gen Y or Gen X, and unlike these latter two, evangelicalism is unlikely to appeal to them for social and cultural reasons. I don’t think an app is going to do the trick, but I understand the thought process and am sympathetic to the motive (though not to the execution). I don’t know what the answer will turn out to be or if there even is an answer. Younger people in greater numbers simply do not recognize a need for any sort of religious discipline or community, and I don’t know what would cause that perspective to shift. Anglicanism, as one author somewhere put it, is “a religion of the ear, not the eye”, and its practice revolves around a book that is read from a fixed point, not the perpetual motion and chaos reminiscent of a Mardi Gras parade that is modern social communication. For whatever reason, it hasn’t seemed to translate well into 21st century society. I hope we figure out why.
Yes there can be. For example you could be a Calvanist or an Arminianist. You could believe in baptism by dunking or sprinkling. However there are core doctrines of Christianity, such as contained in the Creeds, without which you are not a Christian in any meaningful sense.
Indeed, and regarding baptism alone the Anglican church practices BOTH 'believers baptism' AND 'Infant baptism'. Though some might accuse us of heresy the church has baptised infants AND adults since probably the day of Peter's speech on the day of Pentecost. The Baptist denomination decided to drop the sacrament of baptism our infants undergo and introduced a new fangled 'infant dedication' service of it's own to replace it for theirs. Some other denominations have followed suit. .
Most spiritual DYIers now don't bother with the church part as, where many of us live, there is no more social pressure to go to church.
Interestingly enough, I think that appeals at the youngest to boomers. Kids don't buy it. They certainly don't go to church for it. Either they're out-and-out unbelievers, secular humanists, or they want real church, whether of the Hillsong evangelical, Latin Mass smells-and-bells, or even back-to-basics confessional Protestant variety, but the Hillsong type seems to be winning if you want to call it that. Boomer high church: the Orthodox convert boomlet; my guess is that's stalled but I don't know. It was hip among Anglicans and Baptists from about the '80s to the '00s.