Archbishop Foley Beach's November Letter

Discussion in 'Church Strands (Anglo-catholics & Evangelicals)' started by Ananias, Nov 28, 2020.

  1. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Letter can be found here.

    Archbishop Beach mentions the travails of Bishop Love of Albany, and the failure of the Western Anglican leadership to support orthodox Anglicanism. One particular passage of his letter stands out, and I will quote it here:

    Collegiality, like ecumenism, is often a trap for Christians. It is praiseworthy to be respectful and understanding to all, but sometimes a desire to compromise for the sake of harmony can lead one into serious error. The Gospel is one of those things from which Christians must never waver -- it is our True North, our polestar, the bedrock upon which we build our faith. The true doctrine must always be preached, both within the church and without.

    Archbishop Beach seems to sense something I've been feeling for some time myself: that Western Christians are going to have to learn to live as a persecuted minority. The cultural hostility towards orthodox Christian belief is becoming too obvious to be ignored. We Christians have been very comfortable in the civilized West for many centuries now, secure in the knowledge that we formed a decisive majority in our respective countries. But that time is rapidly passing away. I may live to see the day when pagans and atheists outnumber believing Christians in this country. (That day may have already come, depending on how Millennials and Zoomers choose to conduct their spiritual lives as they get older. The trends so far are not promising.)

    If we're going to carry the banner of Christ into this unfriendly new territory, we must be strong in our own faith. We must carry the Gospel with us and go out and make disciples. This newly pagan and atheist land is our mission field.
     
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  2. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    This video from the Church of England Evangelical Council seems related to the issues Archbishop Beach is talking about. It's actually a bit painful to watch, mainly because the script can only address the obvious Biblical injunction against homosexuality at oblique angles to avoid offending anyone. CEEC will fail in this endeavor, obviously, but it's interesting to understand why.

    The main problem is that this video, milquetoast and treacly as it is, is fighting a battle that was lost two decades back. Not one single LQBTQ+ person is going to see this video and think, "Wow! I had it so wrong! I need to accept the actual Gospel of Jesus Christ this very day!" The LGBTQ+ people will instead become enraged and denounce it as hate speech or an incitement to violence (mark my words -- this is as inevitable as the tides). And the CofE will fold as they always do.

    I'm a bit mystified as to what and who this video is for. It is lukewarm, being neither cold nor hot, and will likely be spit out. You don't reform a sinner by assuring them that their sin is fine but this other way is better; you bring them to Jesus by getting them to repent of their sin and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Primo Levi wrote that young people hate ambiguity; their experience being meager, they desire clarity. Young people are probably watching this video (if they can even be bothered to do so) with rolling eyes and snorts of derision.

    There's no middle way on this: the Christian faith and the LGBTQ+ lifestyle are simply incompatible. They cannot be harmonized. This does not mean that homosexual people cannot be saved, but it does mean that they must change their sexual behavior if the want to come to Christ. This message must be stated as clearly and simply as possible by Church leadership, and the Church must be ready for the inevitable (and savage) cultural backlash. The only alternative to this is to allow the Church to be corrupted and eventually destroyed from within.
     
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  3. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    Certainly true of the Hitler Youth Movement. They were supremely confident they'd gotten 'clarity'.
    .
     
  4. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Yeah it’s a sad distance from what evangelicals were like just a generation earlier (John Stott and others).

    Consider people who live without partaking in any of the extremes of a given society. Historically in the West that group has been the strongest, the most populous, and providing the best answers to existing questions. If we want to call it The Center, or the “Middle”, then over recent decades of the West cultures we have seen the phenomenon of “the fraying middle” where they’ve increasingly lost people, resources, and their answers are increasingly irrelevant. The biggest reason is that the concept of the Middle is itself unstable, as new ideas and movements appear on the edges all the time. The Overton Window is constantly shifted, so that what is a center now may appear a radically edgy position two decades later if new views emerge which are SO radical that the new Center has to be something different and the old Center becomes decidedly one of the extremes from then out.

    Now because the new Center can become so radical as to be untenable, people then have to decide if they even want to belong to a Center any longer: if their ideology is stable (comes from sources other than “public opinion”), then it is possible for them to be further and further away from the center.

    What I’m describing above is the position of conservatives in today’s context (church, society, etc). A conservative churchman which was decidedly the very Center in the 1940s, has now eighty years later become the nearly-intolerable fringe. But because their (our) ideology is fixed (not relative), we remain who we are as others continue to drift further and further away. And unfortunately we no longer have the creativity or ingenuity to invent systems (apps, movies, books, ideas) which are capable of converting masses of the people back to our views (but that’s a different question).

    In any case what you’re seeing in that CofE evangelical video is the classic “fraying middle”. They still believe that they are at the Center, and indeed can remain at the Center, if only they encompass the Overton Window and claim ownership of all the soft versions of extremities, on either side, as their own. You want LGBTQPP? Yes we’ve got that (a soft version). You want the gospel? Yes we’ve got that (a soft version). You want us to appear classic respectable english gentlemen? Yes we’ve got that (a soft spineless version). Whatever you want, we can accept it because that’s what we the Custodians of the Center do, we embrace a bit from all sides.

    What they fail to realize is that not all positions are malleable. The Gospel is not malleable, nor the Anglican tradition. By embracing the soft versions of all those things they effectively rejected them. One can be a half-LGBTQPP. But one cannot be a half-Christian.

    Thus we look at them, from our immovable bastion, same now as before, and ever, and we realize the distance between them and the truth; and how nobody wants to join the Center if they are the embodiment of it.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2020
  5. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

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    It is about time people of conviction stood up and called a spade a spade and spoke the truth with love.
     
  6. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    To a certain extent, this is the logical endpoint of the Anglican via media. The English Reformed Church was founded as a power struggle not just between the Roman Catholics and the Reformers, but also between the Reformers themselves. Protestantism is famously prone to faction and schism, and this was evident right from the outset. Cranmer's theology was clearly Reformed (whatever the Church of England came to later), but he was bound by culture, law, and temperament to equivocate and hold what ground he could while he could. The Anglican Communion was born as a temporizing, equivocal, fraught Church, and it has remained so ever since. The "middle way" ethos reflects not theology as such, but culture and politics. The Catholicizing Oxford Movement (Tractarians) of the early 1800's shows how temporizing and accommodation ends up causing division in the Church rather than healing it.

    One of the most devastating mistakes the Christian church ever made was in their (maybe unconscious) decision to downplay God's wrath and focus on God's love instead. Modern Christianity is a Hallmark Card religion, like those gauzy pictures of doves on books and posters with the word "LOVE" written in flowery script. God is love, Jesus is love, it's all love, all the time. And this is true...but love is not all God is. God is also justice, and wrath, and judgement, and holy retribution for sin.

    Our holy God killed the entire world, except for those in the Ark, for the manifold sins of man. God smote the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire for their sins. God killed every firstborn son in Egypt, save those who had daubed lamb's blood on the lintel of their house, to punish Egypt for holding God's people in bondage. God burned up Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu for offering him strange fire. And lest you think that God somehow grew gentler and kinder in the New Testament, remember that he struck Ananias and Saphira dead for trying to defraud the church.

    This is our God. This is the God Christians worship. He is a God of Love, but he is also a God of terrible and inevitable wrath. Our holy God hates sin so much that he condemns all those who commit sin to death. And because all men since Adam are sinners and thus living lives as condemned prisoners, our only salvation is through Jesus Christ. Only through him can we be saved from this terrible fate. There is no other way.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2020
  7. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I would disagree on characterizing Cranmer or any of the orthodox Anglican divines as Reformed, but I'm agreeing on your main point that via media is a broken concept. That being said, we have to understand that it has nothing to do with Anglicanism proper, and only entered Anglican discussion in the later 19th century. It is really an early liberal movement within Anglicanism, where the divines due to the forces of the 19th century had lost sight of the Anglican identity, and started trying to attach the Anglican ship to the identity of others. They even rewrote history where CofE was a softer version of Rome as the Anglo-Catholics did, or it is an offshoot of the Reformed as the early evangelicals did (by way of which I can see what literature you've been reading. :) )

    But none of these later corruptions have anything to do with Anglicanism proper, which never saw itself as a via media between anything, or used even those terms, or in any way formulated their theology in that manner. Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Jewel, Nowell, Bancroft, Andrews, Bilson, Hooker, Laud, Bramhall, Taylor, Cosin, the list is very long, and the concept (not to mention the word) of via media is entirely absent there.

    Anglicanism was always sui juris, a one of a kind, a Church which was tethered to the ancient theology and had no interest in formulating anything new. People have always struggled with understanding where it 'fits', given the massive tomes containing new theology among the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Romans. With Anglicans, what you find are massive tomes restating old theology; an entire book on the Lord's Prayer for instance. I've heard my priest say that the 10 commandments contain all the wisdom of divine law, that a lifetime of study is worthy with them, and that you never 'graduate' from them. That's a stab at pride of someone like me who wants to move on from the 10 commandments to the fun and stimulating new theologies of the modern era.

    So people have struggled with putting our beloved Church into pre-existing categories. Is it more like Rome, or Lutheran, or Reformed, or maybe it's a western version of Eastern orthodoxy? I've literally heard someone say that to me. The idea that it's none of those, that it could be its own category is lost on some people. And yeah in the late 19th century corruption, sight was lost of our identity, and lacking its power, the early liberal churchmen sought to fill the void with a 'via media', something for everyone, hoping that that too could form a sufficient substance for an identity, which it couldn't.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2020
  8. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Interesting stuff.
     
  9. Ananias

    Ananias Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Never forget: the aim of homosexual activists is not tolerance, but affirmation. They will either break the Church or force it to submit.

    It's no accident that this whole thing is being framed as a civil rights issue in the US and England -- if something is enshrined as a right, then infringement can be punished through the courts. This has been the aim all along, to make orthodox Christianity illegal. The same thing motivates the constant cries of "racism" -- if the activist definition of "racism" can be enshrined in law (and it is well on its way) then the leftist worldview will be cemented in law. Therefore to be an orthodox Christian will be against the law in any practical sense.

    Don't be fooled. This is the endgame of the liberal and homosexual activists. They cannot be compromised with. This is a battle that believing Christians must fight and win.