What is Essential

The Rob Bell flap over his views of Hell in “Love Wins” raises an interesting question. Many objected to Bell being criticized, because to them, Hell is not something we know a whole lot about, and our beliefs about the afterlife are not “essential”. So, to some, saying or implying that Bell is “out of bounds” is judgmental and wrong.

A similar question is raised by Roger Olson, who suggests that some Mormons that Mormons maybe could be considered Christians if they accept certain things about Jesus.

Augustine’s famous dictum, “on essentials, unity; on non-essentials, liberty; and in all things charity” can only guide our behavior if we have a consensus on what is essential.

What is Heresy?

The flap over Rob Bell allegedly being called a heretic by Mark Driscoll raises an interesting question. What is heresy and how is it defined?

The late Harold O. J. Brown has suggested that after the Reformation, the term "heresy" is essentially meaningless. Why? Because the term seems to have referred to the notion of "going one's own way", that is: at a time when there was one unified church, those who departed from the teaching of that one unified church were heretics. Once the church ceased to be unified, "going one's own way" could no longer be termed heresy - there was no longer a singular arbiter of what was orthodox. In actuality, the term lost some of its meaning after the separation of the Eastern and Western churches in 1054. Can a Roman Catholic call an Orthodox a heretic with any real authority? It becomes a "he said/he said" conflict.

Yet the term is still used, probably too often. I do not think the term is meaningless, nor do I think Driscoll was entirely off base in saying Rob Bell was straying into heretical territory. Here's why.

Maybe the Last Straw...

The Washington Times today reports that openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson wants to be one of the first in New Hampshire to marry his gay partner. So after the consensus of Global Anglican bishops was that the Episcopal Church should toe the orthodox line on gay issues, this is yet another outrageous and defiant slap in the face to orthodoxy. Meanwhile the NY Times reports that presiding bishopress Katherine Jefforts Schiori is upset that Othodox Nigerian Bishop Peter Akinola is about to consecrate Martin Minns as a bishop here, crossing "boundary" lines. Predictably she considers crossing territorial lines more divisive than biblical morality. She protects her turf, but not the truth.

Like a Spong...

Jason Lee Steorts has a nice review of retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spongs latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. The main thesis of the review is that Spong's religion fails to answer the basic question of whether it is a religion that is good for anything at all. Spong does the usual song and dance about the "story" of Jesus being a major embellishment based on Jewish folklore, that none of the supernatural events in scripture actually occurred, but somehow in this Jesus who is misrepresented in the biblical texts, we can encounter something like a god.

"'As a Christian,' Spong explains, 'I live inside a faith system which, at its core, asserts that in the life of this Jesus, that which we call God has been met, encountered and engaged.'”

This has always been curious to me. If the gospels are so full of legend and embellishment, how do we know enough about Jesus to "encounter" or "engage" him. Doesn't seem to worry Bishop Spong. Why? Because not only is Jesus unintelligible, God is beyond understanding as well.

The Trojan Horse from Tanzania

Two weeks ago, I witnessed the commissioning of Anglican "catechists", an office used extensively in Africa to further the work of the church in places where the number of pastor/priests is insufficient for the number of believers. The vow the catechists were required to take included the responsibility to drive away all false doctrine.

In fact, the Ordination vow from the 1662 Anglican tradition explcitly says that church leaders must "with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God's Word; and both privately and openly to call upon others to do the same." Anglicanism was once wholly committed to biblical doctrine and orthodox protestant could fully affirm.

I posted recently about the conference in Tanzania, here, here, here, and here, where the global Anglican church seemingly held the feet of the Episcopal Church to the fire, the church that has replaced the Gospel with UN Goals and openly ordained the first openly gay bishop. Many hailed this event as the beginning of the end for the TEC, and a path to victory for orthodoxy in the Anglican church.

Now VOL reports that The Society for the Propagation of Reformed Evangelical Anglican Doctrine (SPREAD) suggests that the Tanzania event, upon a careful analysis of the language, is in fact a path to further erosion of the orthodox faith within Anglicanism.

The Continuing Anglican Crisis and the Escalation of the Evangelical Crisis

Hard to know what will be the future of Anglicanism. I follow the news from time to time on VirtueOnline and Global South Anglican websites.

For those who don't know the history, in 2004 the Windsor Report was released in London, the result of ongoing issues related to the Episcopal Church's ordination of openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson and the resulting "alternate oversight" orthodox bishops in the global south were giving to orthodox Anglicans who wished to not be associated with what they believed to be the last straw in a long history of heresy. The Windsor report recommended three small things. It suggeted there be a moratorium on consecrating new gay bishops, a moratorium on the blessing of same gender unions, and it also chastised bishops who crossed ecclesiastical boundaries and established parallel provinces. In practical effect, it solved nothing and extended the anguish.

But just a few weeks ago in Tanzania, the Episcopal Church was given something of an ultimatum, one which surprised many. In Dar Es Salaam, the Global Anglican communion embraced three key propositions with which the TEC must comply at risk of unspecified consequences. It put the focus on the radical novelties of the TEC and actually suggested that the alternate oversight provided by Global South Bishops was understandable, and should be halted only after some other alternative oversight was put in place on an interim basis. Tanzania insisted on:

Over the Edge

In all honesty, I have had a hard time knowing exactly what to think after the whirlwind events of the last couple of weeks in both the PCUSA and ECUSA conventions. I had expected the revisionists in the ECUSA to hold their ground. I did not expect them to stake out new territory. (Much reporting on the convention can be found at David Virtue's news site here.)

In the ECUSA, now simply “The Episcopal Church” or TEC for short, delegates were somewhat stunned at the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori, 52, bishop of Nevada, to the post of Presiding Bishop. Since most Anglican provinces do not ordain women as deacons or priests, much less bishops, this was hardly a conciliatory move to engender trust from other provinces – this was a defiant act of autonomy. On top of this, Schiori is on record as supportive of the consecration of Gene Robinson, the openly Gay Bishop of New Hampshire.

Incredibly, in the Episcopal convention, the House of Deputies voted down a resolution that affirmed Jesus Christ as the "only name by which any person may be saved” by a vote of 675 to 242. Apparently such exclusive language was politically incorrect.

The Fill-in-the-blank Creed of Emergentville

Poking around on the Emergent Village Blog today I found a fairly intriguing post. It seems certain critics of the vagueness of statements from emergent leaders have asked those leaders to produce a statement of faith. This would seem a reasonable request so that we can all know at least what sort of historic Christian doctrines emergent leaders consider essential.

Tony Jones, the National Coordinator of Emergent-U.S. provided a bit of a response by deferring to the statement of LeRon Shults, a former professor of Theology Bethel Seminary and author of The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology and Reforming the Doctrine of God. Jones writes:

"Yes, we have been inundated with requests for our statement of faith in Emergent, but some of us had an inclination that to formulate something would take us down a road that we don't want to trod. So, imagine our joy when a leading theologian joined our ranks and said that such a statement would be disastrous..."

Even given the opinion from Scott McKnight at Jesus Creed that since Emergent is not a denomination, no creed is necessary, one wonders why a simple statement of what doctrines emergent finds essential would be disastrous.

The Ecstatic Heresy

I was just introduced to the writings of the Rev Robert Sanders through a friend of a friend. He was an Episcopal priest, who as part of the crisis in the ECUSA left that group and associated with the Anglican Mission in America, an orthodox missionary movement to the United States led by the Archbishop of Rwanda.

The first article I read, the Ecstatic Heresy, on Sanders website examines the drift of “revisionist” theology over the last two-hundred years. What intrigued me about it was that it parallels many of the issues Francis Schaeffer addressed in his critique of neo-orthodoxy. Sanders refers to a movement, which he attributes to Schleiermacher, as “ecsatatic” theology, a mystical system based not on the words of revealed scripture, but on the experience of a God-consiousness. In the end, Sanders, like Schaeffer, follows the clues to a place where proponents of a new system of theology use the same words as orthodox theologians, but give a very different meaning to the words, in fact teaching a completely false faith. Though Schaeffer and Sanders come from very different perspectives, Schaeffer a committed Presbyterian and Sanders an Anglican, there are parallels to the issues they faced in their different situations, and possible parallels to issues evangelicals face today.

50 Most Influential ... Christians?

I have long had problems with the broad definition of what makes an "evangelical". In the old understanding of the term, an evangelical was one who accepted the unique and final authority of scripture, and considered justification by grace alone through faith alone as the central tenets of belief. Most evangelicals took for granted the doctrines of the Nicene Creed even if that creed was not something emphasized in local church Christian Education or recited as part of the order of weekly service. Doctrinal statements restated the basic Trinitarian beliefs for most evangelicals.

But thirty years of experience in "evangelical" circles made me increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of the times. I had not read Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" or David Wells' "No Place for Truth", but I knew that theology had come to be considered the domain of scholars and largely irrelevant and unimportant for church life and particularly church growth.

The Church Report.com, which describes itself as "the online resource for Christian leaders, pastors and Para church executives" has published a list of the 50 most influential Christian leaders in America. This list only solidifies my belief that evangelicalism is drifting further and further from orthodoxy.