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The Future of the Faith

THE FUTURE OF THE FAITH

By Stan Sinclair
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
July 25, 2015

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Faith is at the heart of every Christian's life, either a deep and abiding faith in God and trust in Him no matter what happens, or a less certain faith that the individual struggles to hold on to. Faith is so personal, often mystical, but The Faith, from which this springs, is founded upon the events recorded in the Gospels, encompassing the experiences of the Twelve and the Seventy, and the families around them with the One whom they called Lord, and Master, and Son of God.

And without Christians committed to the essentials of the Gospel message, as represented among others by traditional Anglicanism, that treasure of faith will be ever less available to bring the love of God and hope to humanity in the face of the mounting campaign against the Christian faith.

When we speak of "The Faith," we are acknowledging that it also encompasses the further experiences of the whole company of those who, under many names, are gathered into what we call the Church. The Anglican tradition is one that so many of us hold dear, because we believe it is of God: that He has guided its development, from the time of the early British Church, unto the emergence of a cohesive faith and life following the vicissitudes of the 16th and 17th centuries, so that it became a vital, contributing part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

To bring up the "future of the Faith" suggests that it is under threat, because it is. One of the obligations we take upon ourselves as traditional Anglicans is the defence of that faith.

I have heard contemporary Christian leaders speak disparagingly of "The Faith," because they think that makes it too much of a "package deal." However, that term goes back to the origins of our belief in Christ, in those familiar words, "The Faith once for all delivered to the saints." For us who follow Him the Scriptures, the Christian way of life, our ways of worship, the historic nature of the Church as we have known it are all bound up together in the Faith, and that distinctive expression of it which we call the Anglican tradition.

For most of the 20th Century Anglican theologians took their place among the most distinguished in the world, and most of them quite orthodox in their teachings. The lay theologians C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers were amongst the best known and read, but there have been so many others, too numerous to mention, from both the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical schools of religious thought. Radical revisionist theology and biblical studies which were little known outside the ivy-covered walls and discussions among some scholars began to be influential following World War II, reaching a high point of public awareness starting in the 1960s. Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer became almost household names, certainly among the more serious laity, along with Karl Barth. They represented a spectrum of theological views, all of them somehow different from traditional orthodoxy. What they had to say was far removed from the theological norms in the Anglican world, which embraced some of them later on. But the real opponents of traditional Anglicanism are yet to come.

It is no secret that the Christian faith is under attack on many fronts, but none has been worse that the damage done by those on the inside who seem to know more about it, twenty centuries after the fact, than those who were there at the time.

The Faith of Christ has been scrutinised, criticised, revised, and diluted over the past century, but particularly from the 1960s, with a succession of challenges within the Anglican spectrum, delivered by Bishop Pike, Bishop Robinson, Bishop Holloway, Bishop Jenkins, and Bishop Spong, as well as a couple of radical Canadians, Harrison and Berton, whose book The Comfortable Pew was a best seller, and though highly tendentious, and the work of a liberal outside the Anglican Church, inspired much more in the way of negative thinking within its ranks. Meanwhile Anglican seminaries, especially in the U.S. but soon followed obediently in Canada, became centres of radical thought and spiritual unrest that has greatly influenced the clergy of the past forty years in particular, and has led to the widespread abandonment of the Prayer Book, with a consequent decline in biblical theology, and the increasing role of the feminist agenda within the Church.

Only Bishop Robinson later greatly changed his stance and seemed to have made his peace with traditional Christianity, to the extent that he regarded St John's Gospel as virtually the most important. The future of the Christian faith has been questioned by many commentators on religious matters, including predictions of the collapse of most of the churches.

What are we to make of these critics and those predictions?

We have the assurance which Christ gave to us, which can be summarised in just a few of his own words, "I have overcome the world."

No matter how often there arise movements that compromise the integrity of the faith, or the standards of Christian behaviour, in the end they are excluded from the mainstream of the Church, through the power of the Spirit, the faithfulness of what is at times only a remnant, and the character of the Church's authentic treasure.

Time after time, from the early challengers of true Christian belief and practise, such as the Nicolaitans, the Gnostics, the Adoptionists, and later the Arians, and the Monophysites--to name only a few, the Church has been faced with one false teaching after another, and the resulting controversy and the inevitable scandal of disunity. These are all the product of faulty human reason, distortion of the truth, skepticism towards some aspect of the Word of God, or the competing ideals of the outside world impinging upon the Church.

No wonder St Jude said, late in the First Century, as the Church, in the dying days of the apostolic era, "Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares....ungodly men, turning the grace of our God unto lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ."

But each of these "men crept in unawares," no matter what damage they have done to simple faith, no matter how they have distorted or discounted "the faith once delivered," and have battered the Body of Christ, did not succeed either in taking over the Church, replacing the true faith and practise from apostolic times, in more than one area or one body of Christians. Sooner or later the errant dioceses or national churches or important church figures who embraced and promoted these deviations from gospel truth have gone down to defeat. Even though their heresies have endured in various corners of Christendom, they lost their potency and most of their influence until these days.

Defenders of the faith have often suffered greatly, St Athanasius, of course, being perhaps the most notable, until the martyrs of the Reformation--excluding the sectarians who opposed mediaeval Catholicism but offered nothing more authentic to replace it.

I think it is fair to say that, Henry VIII and his desired annulment aside, the Anglican Church held on to the true faith of the Church. In some cases that meant a considerable deviation from certain teachings which had taken hold in the Catholic Church at that time, contrary to the evangelical principles derived from the early days as taught by the apostles and their successors, and also in opposition to some of the Protestant ideas which arose in contradistinction to apostolic faith. Too many Protestants were, in the old simile, ready to "throw out the baby with the bath water."

This is really the first period in church history when not just heresies have arisen or been revisited, but that church leaders have openly questioned and even denied fundamental doctrines of the Church, including the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, and many teachings of the Bible.

The timeless Anglican Tradition is entirely committed to the Christian Faith as we find it in the Bible, the Creeds, and the decisions of the great Councils of the "Undivided Church." The fact that Anglicanism has questioned some doctrines espoused by the Roman Church, and has had the willingness to allow some latitude of interpretation, has been misunderstood to mean a carte blanche to hold whatever beliefs one wishes to hold, and in the case of the latter-day skeptics in episcopal purple, to deny many truths enshrined in the Faith as it was "once delivered."

That phrase has been questioned, but it makes perfect sense. Our Faith, the whole of it, was "delivered" to us, by the prophets, then by Christ Himself, because ours is a revealed faith, not the product of human speculation and study. Despite all arguments to the contrary, we have a considerable body of evidence to support the accuracy and authenticity of this faith.

And that is the very difference between the Catholic Faith and heresy. Heresy trusts human reason and accepts philosophical speculation far more than revealed truth. Yet human reason is so often faulty, and speculation commandeers human reason to arrive at conclusions about matters of faith, rather than accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the written Word. Furthermore heresy raises the opinion of Man above the wisdom of God.

The Anglican Tradition has certainly valued human reason, when it is used in keeping with our Christian faith, rather than in opposition over-riding its tenets. In the end the conclusions of intellectual endeavour have no right to claim their own infallibility: usually they stop short of such a claim, but in practise they are apt to dismiss the truth that is in Jesus. What we have received from on high is utterly suspect, whereas our ideas and fancies are accorded the ultimate respect.

Churches committed to the Anglican tradition, as we have received it, therefore are crucial to the survival of authentic Christian teaching and to the real proclamation of the Gospel, both Catholic and Evangelical.

Many of us grew up with the teachings of the Faith, hearing sermons which inspired us, preaching of Christ crucified, the Holy Trinity, the assurance of divine love, the moral teachings which flow from the New Testament, and the promise of life eternal. But for younger people especially, there is less and less access to genuine Christian teaching, and defence of the faith, which traditional Anglicanism is committed to maintain. Only through the courage of our convictions can we, like those in other periods of religious disorder, be strong in the Lord. This concerns not just our comfort level with familiar teachings, but the salvation of souls.

Contemporary revisionist liberal and radical religion have little or nothing to say about the salvation of souls. Prominent theologians present laissez faire "situational ethics" and worldly morality unrelated to the Gospel; have virtually denied the existence of Hell, in contradiction of Jesus, and seem to have a very hazy view of Heaven.

"How can they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in Him of whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher?" The survival of traditional Anglicanism is an important component of the future of the Faith.

Stanley Sinclair is the retired rector of St, Mark's Anglican Church (Anglican Province of Christ the King) in Victoria, B.C., Canada, where he currently resides. He is still active in parish ministry and teaches an extension course in Pastoral and Moral Theology, which he developed, through St. Joseph of Arimathaea Seminary, Berkeley, California.

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