Peter Toon recently penned an essay on the Anglican church and their slow but certain demise. Where the holy, catholic and apostolic church (singular) met in its entirety during the first thousand years of existence, since then the broken churches meet only amongst themselves. Its no wonder that they allow themselves to get spun so far from the word of God when the only voices they hear are the loudest voice from within their own ranks. Regretfully, those voices have gotten too loud to hear the one true voice. They only hear themselves now.
I’m reminded of this quote from CS Lewis:
Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because we found it modern and successful. . . . Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed in the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point a which (for the moment) he believes another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity, they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.
Not ironically, Lewis was speaking of the Anglican church. The Anglican - more specifically the American Episcopal - church has allowed itself to drift with a certain current of ideas that are just plain wrong. Even worse, they’re sacrilegious. (Full disclosure - my family was part of the Episcopal church until November 4, 2004)
Toon looks back at the decisions made in the first Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops in 1930 and examines the decisions that were made and how those same decisions have manifested themselves in 2008.
the supporters of same-sex arrangements worked over-hard to seek justification for their position by new and involved interpretations of Scripture, thereby twisting the meaning of the Bible to make it say the very opposite of what it actually says and had been heard to say by millions over millennia. And all this, it was alleged, was to avoid the clear sense and meaning of the Bible, which is that God has willed marriage for a man and a woman.
The 2008 Lambeth Conference just ended. What decisions did they make that will shape the future of their church? Stay tuned.
