Anglican Down Under: Where is the way?

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Where is the way?

Being a Christian is a curious pathway to travel. We cherish the thought that it is an upward path ("onwards and upwards"), towards a goal (the mountain top?), but we are in constant tension between the path being a very narrow ridge (only the faithful few, of which I am glad to be one, will make it) and a very wide way (God loves and calls all people to belong to him, it is a comfort to be part of a popular movement).

For myself I am increasingly dubious about proposals for being Christian which define 'Christian' in narrow terms so that those who will reach the mountain top are predetermined to be (say) Calvinists, or Catholics or Pentecostalists but not all of the above. Yet I am also crystal clear that what we believe matters, that (for instance) Mormonism is not able to be accommodated into the broadest understanding of Christian orthodoxy. Or, to go back to yesterday's post, I think it matters how we approach the Bible as the Holy Scripture of the church, and thus it is worth being Mark Thompson taking time and trouble to call out error within the church.

Within this tension of what it means to be a Christian, engaging with the width of the way, a worthwhile read, both the article and the ensuing comments is found on Fulcrum, where Gordon Kuhrt reviews Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones - the Life and Legacy of 'the Doctor'.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Seeking the answer to questions that Scripture keeps at least partially veiled will always leave us perplexed to some degree. Faith always has to reckon with some amount of tension, which means holding together statements that formally, at least, may appear contradictory: e.g., 'God so loved the world etc' and 'Strait is the gate and narrow is the path that leadeth unto life and few there are that find it.' The majority of the human race has never been baptised or consciously Christian. Have they no purpose in God's plan? Of course not - but that hasn't been disclosed to us. We may speculate (e.g. with counter-factual Molinism or in the way C S Lewis does in the conclusion of The Last Battle), but our first duty is to spread the light we are given (not put it under a bushel) and to guard the deposit of the Gospel (not to throw it away).

Martin; May 2, 2013 at 6:35 PM

Anglican Down Under

Welcome to this blog on Anglican, theological, biblical and other matters, mostly missional or liturgical (but I reserve the right to write about cricket and politics). It is grounded in some islands at the bottom of the world which, together with a large island to our west, constitute fabulous Down Under.

I have two related blogs which I post on less frequently:

Hermeneutics and Human Dignity

Resourcing Preaching and Worship Down Under

I am Bishop of the Diocese of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia (ACANZP). I am trying to write in ways which contribute to the flourishing of the church of God - a church represented in the Anglican Communion, in the Anglican churches of these islands and, of course, in my Diocese. You will judge whether I am succeeding or not!

Pearls

Show us anything clearly set forth in Holy Scripture that we do not teach and we will teach it. Show us anything in our teaching or practice is clearly contrary to Holy Scripture, and we will abandon it.

Stephen Neill

For the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the glory of humanity is the vision of God.

St Irenaeus

Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society.

Masure

We have returned to the Apostles and the old Catholic Fathers. We have planted no new religion, but only preserved the old that was undoubtedly founded and used by the Apostles of Christ and other holy Fathers of the Primitive Church.

Bishop Jewel

Preachers shall behave themselves modestly and soberly in every department of their life. But especially shall they see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon, which they would have religiously held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old or New Testament, and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have collected from this selfsame doctrine.

Canon 6 from the 1571 Bishop’s Convocation

Kent: "See better, Lear, and let me still remain."

William Shakespeare

For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.

Wittgenstein

Justice is eternal, and doesn't depend at all on human conventions.

Montesquieu

The real challenge of Islam to Western intellectual discourse is for us to ask ourselves whether our unprecedented modern experiment of conducting political life with no transcendent values is really working out as well as we once hoped.

Harvey Cox

The long-term happiness of a society depends on how individuals behave towards each other, how families hold together, and how leaders keep the trust of people.

William Hague

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

John Neuhaus

To be an evangelical is not, first and foremost, about doctrinal correctness, but about a passion for the gospel of salvation from sin through Christ for eternity.

John Richardson

Neither may we ... lightly esteem what hath been allowed as fit in the judgement of antiquity, and by the long continued practice of the whole church; from which unnecessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe.

Richard Hooker (Lawes, V.7.1)

The function of the Christian canon was to separate the apostolic witness from the ongoing tradition of the church, whose truth was continually in need of being tested by the apostolic faith.

Brevard S. Childs

Every word of God proves true. (Proverbs 30:5)

If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.

Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi

Change comes through ordinary working people organising themselves to struggle for a better world day in, day out.

Morning Star newspaper editorial Tuesday 5 May 2015

"In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl."

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Thursday, May 2, 2013

Where is the way?

1 comment: