That background might lead you to ask, ‘So what’s changed now?’ If the denomination has long been compromised in these ways, and evangelicals have always struggled within it, why are we arguing that we have now reached a moment of crisis where decisive action needs to be taken? What is different about what’s happening at the moment?
The Five New Elements
I want to suggest that there are five features of what has been happening in the last fifty years or so that have brought this current crisis to a head.
1. The first is an increasing number of public challenges to orthodox doctrine grounded in plain biblical teaching by serving bishops and other leaders in the Anglican Communion. It really is simply a matter of historical record that the last fifty years or so have witnessed an increasingly virulent attack upon biblical truth and biblical morality led by those who should have been guarding both. There had, of course, been a long history of such an attack from within the universities and colleges. Academic liberal theology had been flexing its muscles for over a century. Yet in the nineteenth and early twentieth century serving bishops within the Anglican communion had mostly been rather guarded in their public comments and made no attempt to change the teaching of the denomination in any official way.
Although it might not have been the first instance of this, we might start with the publication, in 1963 of John A. T. Robinson’s book Honest to God.4 At the time he was the Bishop of Woolwich. In that book he questioned the doctrine of God and many other elements of classic Anglican teaching. And this was the new thing: that a serving bishop should mount a challenge to the doctrine of the articles and the teaching of the Bible in such a public and unashamed way.
Even before his consecration as Bishop of Newark in 1976, John Shelby Spong, an admirer of J. A. T. Robinson, had been writing controversial books. In fact his controversial views would eventually lead to charges of heresy, which were dismissed in 1987. In 1986 he published Beyond Moralism: A Contemporary View of the Ten Commandments. Two years later he wrote Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality. A year later he openly and knowingly ordained a practicing homosexual man. He has denied the uniqueness of Christ as the only saviour of the world, and the authority of the Scriptures to determine Christian doctrine and Christian practice. In 2001 he published his autobiography: Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality.5 In it he appended ‘Twelve Theses for Christianity in the Twenty-first century’ which begin with the breathtaking statement, ‘Theism as a way of defining God, is dead’.
In 1984, the then bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, gained notoriety by commenting in a BBC interview that the belief that Jesus was raised bodily from the grave was ridiculous, an infantile preoccupation with ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. His comments were regarded as controversial and he has argued they were taken out of context, but on any account is hard to reconcile them with the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 — ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve’ (vv. 3–5).
In 1995 the then bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, defended his cathedral’s invitation to a practicing Muslim to preach the university sermon on the BBC’s ‘Thought for the Day’. He quoted Jesus’ words ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God’ and then went on to deduce that since the Muslim concerned was working for peace in his own country he not only came under the blessing of Jesus, but shared the title Son of God with him. When challenged about the uniqueness of Jesus on the basis of John 14:6 he wrote ‘to suggest that Jesus actually said those words is to deny 150 years of scholarship in the Gospel of John.6
Michael Ingham, the present day Bishop of New Westminster in the Church of Canada was interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen in September 1997. In that interview he insisted, ‘It’s time for Christians to drop the idea that Christ is the one sure way to salvation’.7 He developed these ideas in his book of the same year, Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multifaith World.8
Outlandish statements by bishops of the Anglican Communion, undermining the teaching of Scripture and the doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion are only barely newsworthy these days. They seem to come with such regularity and disdain for anyone who disagrees with them that only rarely do they provoke controversy. Instead, it’s the orthodox who are the source of scandal as far as the secular press is concerned. Statements of orthodox Anglican doctrine are often ridiculed and then dismissed.
Comments:
I think his five points are very accurate but I believe Dr. Thompson is dead wrong on how he is framing his argument. I think his advocation for evangelicalism is misguided and divisive and will ultimately cause this line of logic to fail.
I write as one whole grew up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. I need to remove the log from my own eye and own the collective sins from those who would call themselves Anglo-Catholic. He is correct that most who have brought errant teaching in Anglicanism have entered claimed to be Anglo-Catholic, hiding behind ritual while no one called them out. To move from the historical teaching of the Church and from the Church Universal is NOT catholic in any sense of the word. It is just as much an oxymoron as a “Charismatic” who denies the existence of the Holy Spirit. Yet, we did not call them out, we allow ++Rowan to claim to be catholic in his thinking when his actions are moving away from Tradition and Church Universal.
However, Evangelicals need to stop trying to blame other camps and own the sins in their own camp! How many “black hats” listed in “Arguing for the Infallibility of Scripture” thread are thought of as evangelical? In Dr. Mark Thompson’s first point is the reference to the last 150 years of scholarship in the Gospel of John.¹ I disagree that Henry Newman taught us to lie and I think he gives a misrepresentation of the Puritans (love their writings but the history is complex and a few evangelicals were also happy to see them go). He is not owning that many so-called evangelical bishops in the UK are very “loosy-goosy” when it comes to the Divine Word. I have been let down by more evangelicals not upholding Scripture this past year than any other group. Actually it’s the more catholic bishops in the US that have the most back bone (compare FiFNA ones with the Camp Allen ones). So there is a log in his eye too, I think that camp needs to own before we all can move back to Biblical Christianity (that happens to be more traditional and universal).
Honestly the terms means so little and tend to be applied so broadly that they mean little now on all sides. I think we need to restate them for ourselves then own the sins of the group we belong.
----
¹ The last 10 have completely disproven and hold on to your hats (white or black) for the whole field of NT scholarship will be rewritten in the next fifty years as multispectral imaging is being applied to millions of pieces of parchment that currently are unreadable, so in the mix of contracts, works of Archimedes already have been found scraps of the NT older than previously know copies. The best part is that these are not in the hands of Biblical scholars, thus they don’t know finding a document that test years earlier than previously known just shattered many pet theories so these technicians and curators will be excited. So from one of my loves to the great One, technology for remote sensing on Mars applied to the Divine Word!