Tag: Gospel

“Empowering”

By Bishop Paul C. Hewett

“Empowering” — for years I have had grave misgivings about this word, and this concept, which crept into our social and political and even theological discourse during the past generation. I decided to never use the word. Never.

Instead it became necessary to search out all biblical uses of the word “power.” All power belongs to God, and when He shares His power with us, perhaps thought of as one of His energies, He does so in the context of our growth in virtue and character formation. What good is power in the hands of someone who will abuse it? God can only share His power with us as we grow in our capacity for humility, gentleness and love.

Then, biblically, it becomes clear that power is not something we get, to fill a void, or for social engineering, or to get a job done. Power is the sanction to serve. It is seen in our Lord, who took up a towel at the Last Supper to wash the apostles’ feet. Our Lord will show, in His Passion and Death, that the essence of glory is self-giving love. Many an Orthodox icon of the Cross has an inscription on it, “The King of Glory.” Jesus’ glory, and His power, is pre-eminently shown forth in His self emptying, His kenosis, His blood-shedding for us.

The emphasis in social engineering circles, on empowering women and minorities, allows us to fall into the bottomless pit of gnosticism. For the gnostic, power is the ultimate moral absolute. One must be striving to break the glass ceiling, to get power. For the Jew and the Christian, love is the ultimate moral absolute. As John Zizioulas would say, love is the ultimate ontological category. Our goal as Christians is not to get something, like fulfillment, or power, but to grow in our capacity to love God, and our neighbor-in-God. And to enlarge that capacity, God very often uses hardship and suffering.

Just before the day of Pentecost, Jesus tells His apostles that “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses unto me…” (Acts 1: 8) Power here comes from the Holy Ghost, for the purpose of witnessing to Jesus, and His Death and Resurrection. St. Paul, writing to Timothy, says “Stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1: 6-7) The purpose of this bestowal is “the testimony of our Lord,” that “the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified.” (2 Thessalonians 3: 1) Power is for the spread of the Gospel, in our hearts, and in the world. To “have power” is to be filled with the Holy Spirit. “The issue here is not how much of the Holy Spirit we have, but how much of us the Holy Spirit has.”

When St. Paul writes his second letter to the Corinthians, he cites several times a theme of God’s strength and power shown through our weakness and brokenness. St. Paul is ministering among the Corinthians “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” (2 Corinthians 6: 10) He is in this way setting forth the Paschal Mystery of new and indestructible life, wrought on the Cross with Jesus’ death. This is the mystery of the ultimate, cosmic victory of life-in-Christ, won by ultimate, cosmic sacrifice. St. Paul goes on to remind the Corinthians in chapter 11 of his “weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fasting often, in cold and nakedness. Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak?..if I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities…that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” (11: 27-28; 12: 9)

The Collect for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity begins, “O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity…” An anointing of power, with which the Father is eager to equip us, through the Son, in the Spirit, is for the same purpose: showing mercy and pity in our life together in the Church, and in our ministrations to the world. This is a power not to engineer a better society, according to a secular blueprint, but a dynamic that works in mysterious ways, through self-giving love, to change a stubborn world for Christ. Theories of power involving races, classes or sexes, to “empower” victims, can, without Christ, do little more than create new forms of hell on earth.

In this light one could propose Mother Teresa of Calcutta as the “most powerful” woman of the 20th century. And in the second half of the 19th century, we could nominate the obscure Carmelite nun, whose autobiography is the best selling book of all times, next to the Bible, St. Therese of Lisieux. Therese, who wrote of “The Little Way” to holiness, exalting simplicity and hiddenness and little things done for the love of God, is read and taken to heart by hundreds of millions. Her contemporary in Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about “The Will to Power” and the Superman, is by comparison scarcely read or cared about by anyone. Holiness is the ultimately most exciting and amazing thing there is, and power is an illusion which falls like sand through our fingers.

We think of the tiresome quests for power in the world all around us, power which is supposedly going to be used to better our lot in some way. There are countless schemes to re-engineer society or to plan for some utopia. People think that if only they could “get power” or be empowered, that they would be on their way to “progress.” But in the 4th Century the great Cappadocean Father, Gregory of Nazianzus, said it all: “a single drop of Blood remakes the universe.”

Leaving home: The Future of the Faith in England

By Gavin Ashenden

The thought of leaving Canterbury, spiritually or emotionally, breaks my heart. I grew up there. I spent five years in the school built around its cloisters. I sang from its tower on Ascension days. I sat for hours at the entrance to the cloisters where Thomas a Becket was struck down for refusing the demands of the secular over the sacred. I took the Eucharist there in the bowels of its undercroft before dawn in the mists of winter. I was confirmed there when the saintly prophetic Michael Ramsey was Archbishop.

But Canterbury has sold its birthright. She planted the orthodox Gospel around the world so that scores of millions worship our adored Risen Christ, but has slid from under the obligations of the Apostolic faith she received, to a heterodox secularized shadow of that faith.

I often wonder how I could explain our present difficulties to St Augustine who came here to evangelise in 597. I think I would say that “just as you, blessed brother in Christ, are still struggling with the Arians, who are powerful in Eastern Europe at the moment, we are struggling with the new Arians. Just as you will overcome them by the 8th Century, we will too, by the power of the Spirit.

But our Arians have assaulted the apostolic faith not by a full on assault on the Holy Trinity, but by a sideways undermining of it. Jesus has become less than the 2nd person of the Trinity because he has been reduced by claiming he suffered from cultural ignorance; he is thought to be captive to a 1st century culture with its misogyny and restricted sexual ethics. Our heretics have decided that Jesus did not come to reveal the Father, because they have adopted a new secular and essentially Marxist idea, that gender is an oppressive cultural construct. And they join that idea to a second piece of Marxism, that ‘equality’ is the most important social value to strive after. The masculinity of the Father, and that of the Son, are for them unwelcome cultural constraints. The revelation of a hierarchy of glory inverted by love became an anathema to them, because they worship equality.

So they overthrew 2,000 years of apostolic teaching, and ordained women into the place of the Bishop and priest, the representatives of the risen Christ at the Eucharist, saying that gender was of no consequence in the narrative of salvation.

They relentlessly attacked St Paul for teaching us the mystery of the interdependence of man and women in a hierarchy of love and service.

As it happens this coincided with a secular assault on fatherhood. But being spiritually not very aware, they took some pride in joining forces with the secular gender wars, where feminists moved from defending the abuse of women to attacking the role of men. Astonishingly, instead of modeling their Christian femininity on Mary, and honouring the gift of joining in the privilege of co-creating in Motherhood, they repudiated their own motherhood. They joined forces with the feminists and supported the holocaust of abortion – mothers killing their own babies. 57 million in America. 7 million here. Many of the of the new so called Christian women priests describe themselves as feminists, assaulting the masculine and defending the right of women to murder their children.

This is of course was a turning away from the natural order of creation, – in just the way that St Paul described in his letter to the Romans. And you will guess what came next. With the increase of idolatry- the worshipping of the human will and appteties, human relations began to be twisted out of shape. It won’t surprise you that one form of narcissism led to another. The egalitarians attacked the creation ordinance of marriage where men and women come together in mutual dependence under God to create children, and celebrated instead the sterile coupling of men with men and women with women. And where faithful Christians stood up in the public market place to give witness to your Word, the new women priests and their supporters, for whom this sexual narcissism was part of their allegiance to egalitarianism, celebrated the jailing and fining of the faithful as the just punishment for what they called ‘bigotry’.

Your successor as Archbishop stood in the House of Lords to praise the couplings of the homosexuals. It didn’t matter to him that they were biologically sterile and pursued romantic and sexual values that Holy Scripture warned against. He claimed rather that were emotionally fruitful. He even chose to ignore the secular evidence that these relationships consisted of greater domestic violence between women partners, greater promiscuity between male partners and greater social instability for both.

And so the place where you brought the Gospel, and the Church that inherited the Gospel has betrayed not only you, not only those who held office after you, but the Christ in whose name you came. They give him nominal acknowledgement , of course- how could they not, but they deny His invitation to sexual purity and distort His representation of the Father, and prefer the teaching of social Marxism to obedience to the Gospels.

And I think St Augustine might then say, “but are there no orthodox bishops left you could turn to?”

And the answer would be “Yes, many. All round the world there are faithful Archbishops and bishops faithful to what Canterbury planted in their cultures and hearts. They are called the Global Anglican Fellowship.”

“So then” he would reply, “your question is not where, but when – you re-align your allegiance to my successors?”

And that is the question.

We have yet to hear what the Gafcon Primates decided after they met to pray and wait on the Holy Spirit in London this month.

Our cultural circumstances are very close to those in America. We know that where TEC pursued relativism and secularism, it found only spiritual and institutional corruption.

We know that under Archbishop Foley Beach the ACNA has continued to plant Churches, convert the lost and longing to the faith, and reconcile the catholic, evangelical and charismatic charisms. It has kept the historic and apostolic teaching about gender and sexuality. It has resisted the spirit of the age. It flourishes.

We know too that the General Synod of the Church of England has worked assiduously hard to contain and diminish the influence and convictions of those who have kept the orthodox faith.

The spiritual health of the Church of England is a matter of discernment. But since its character as an established Church acts as a kind of chaplaincy to a determinedly secular society, how long can it survive in that role and retain its fidelity to the Gospels? Instinctively, those who place public prestige before obedience to the faith of the saints and the martyrs, will of course adapt their ethics to make them congenial to the culture on whose pleasure they wait. And so they have:– feminism has reconfigured the Church and secularism has redefined marriage – and the leaders of the C of E welcome both.

In a recent BBC radio programme, a leading voice for Anglican feminism, complained about the repressive patriarchal structures of the Church. They inhibited her being both a mother and a parish priest. She called upon the Church to redefine its expectations of parish clergy, so they could be mothers as well. The possibility that a priest ought to be the father in God to a parish full time, over years of service, was foreign to her feminist priorities. So the Church was supposed to adapt its pastoral practice to her demands to be both a woman ‘priest’ and a mother.

What might the leaders of the Global Anglican Fellowship do?

They might establish the parallel jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in England (or/and Europe). ACE.

They would provide bishops who held the orthodox faith of the Church to those Anglicans who had refused to bow the knee to the new Baal of egalitarianism. These bishops would care for their clergy and confirm their people – not into the Church of England, but into the orthodox Anglicanism of the majority of worldwide Anglicans.

In America, where the legal issues of who held the rights to the property of the Churches, 7 million dollars has been spend by TEC grabbing back churches where they could – ejecting their faithful congregations, and in some cases, selling them on as mosques.

In England, where the legal issues are very different, the orthodox clergy and people who give their allegiance to ACE will remain quietly in their livings, continue to pay their voluntary quotas to cover their stipends, but to withdraw anything more than that in protest against the imposition of the new heterodoxy.

The financial health of the Church of England, unlike its spiritual health is a matter of fact, not discernment. It is a matter of accounts and demographics. The average age of congregations is now 65. Many dioceses are close to cash flow failure. The Diocese of Truro, its bishop laments, has less than 5 years viability ahead of it. A diocese in the middle of England recently took out a bank loan to pay its stipends for the current month. The Diocese of Southwark is kept afloat only by evangelicals who astonishingly have not yet lost faith with a hierarchy that continually appoints gay clergy in partnerships to prominent positions of responsibility.

In the General Synod of July 2008 the progressive majority implacably refused the pleadings of the evangelical and catholic laity (mainly women as it happened) to be allowed to remain in the C of E with guaranteed orthodox episcopal oversight. The Catholics were given a fragile deal that depends on ‘trust’ and there is still no bishop whose view of gender mirrors that of the Apostle Paul amongst the evangelicals; and when finally one is announced, his hands will be tied by the concept of collegial responsibility to his heterodox colleagues.

Very well then, let the Anglican Primates give the orthodox Anglican faithful the orthodox bishops the General Synod refused to give. Let the clergy remain in their parishes for the next 5-7 years at least. And when the biblically and apostolically faithful congregations and clergy give their money to support their new bishops, and promote orthodox Anglicanism instead, it will not to come as much of a surprise.

As the structures of the C of E collapse under the pressure of aging and bankruptcy, those who have kept the faith can offer to ease the crumbling diocesan finances by taking 100 year leases on their parish Churches.

Why now? When I came back to Christ in the mid 1970’s and discovered to my surprise that the Holy Spirit was calling me to be a priest, I was enthused and inspired by the slow quiet beginnings of a charismatic renewal that appeared to be able to bring together both the evangelical and the catholic streams of the Church to re-evangelise the nation and to refresh and renew the Body of Christ.

In the last 40 years, what has happened instead, is that the Church of England turned its back on the Spirit and the Scriptures and gave herself to the new secularism. It has preferred egalitarianism to evangelism; it has chosen the struggle for gender parity to the struggle for the Gospel purity.

I had hoped that we might continue the struggle to renew and revive her, but the moment she reconfigured the apostolic structure of the episcopate to appease the demands for a Church that reflects social Marxism in preference to the patterns of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, the game was up. The next domino to fall will be the acceptance and then the promotion of gay marriage.

It is time for that revivified Anglicanism the Holy Spirit sought to give birth to 40 years ago, as he constantly brings an obedient Church to new birth. But the birth can only take place in conformity to the Scripture and faithful tradition; and it needs orthodox bishops.

Gafcon Primates – over to you.

See more at Anglican Ink