Jan. 18, 2016 Show with David Ould on “The State & Future of the Anglican & Episcopal Church” (& Assessment of “Primates 2016”)

Iron Sharpens Iron

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April 12, 2016

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
00:46: It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
00:56: Now here's our host, Chris Arnton. Good afternoon,
01:07: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming.
01:15: This is Chris Arnton, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you a happy Monday on this 18th day of January 2016, and it's actually in Sydney, Australia right now,
01:30: Tuesday, January 19th, 2016, and the reason why
01:36: I mention Sydney, Australia is that we have a guest today for the very first time,
01:42: I believe, from Sydney, Australia, well, at least calling from Sydney, Australia.
01:48: We may have had some guests who originated from there, but we actually have today calling in from Sydney, Australia for the first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron, David Old, who is the rector of an
02:04: Anglican church in Sydney, Australia, as I mentioned, and the name of the church is the
02:11: Glencarry Anglican Church in Sydney, and I may have butchered that name, but we'll find out in a second, and today we are going to be discussing the state and future of the
02:24: Anglican and Episcopal church, and also an assessment of primates 2016, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first on Iron Sharpens Iron, David Old.
02:37: Hi, thank you. Good morning, Chris. How are you? I'm doing great, especially since you're coming in loud and clear so far all the way from Sydney, Australia.
02:47: By the way, am I pronouncing your last name correctly, Old? It's Old, as in not new or mold.
02:55: Right, Old, and it's spelt with a U, O -U -L -D. It is spelt with a U, as with all things
03:01: British, we put a U in where Americans would not expect U's to be. I blame my father,
03:08: I have no one else to blame. And as far as the name of the church, is it
03:14: Glencarry Anglican Church? Oh, you murdered that. Glenquarry Anglican Church.
03:20: Okay, Glenquarry Anglican Church, okay. I think
03:25: I'm thinking of the very famous movie with Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross, but that's...
03:33: That's the one you're thinking of, yeah. Well, before we even go into the topic at hand, which is largely as a result of some meetings in England, London, England, that took place recently called
03:48: Primates 2016, and for our listeners who are not Anglican or Episcopalian, Primates 2016 was not an exhibit of gorillas and monkeys at the
03:59: Bronx Zoo or anything like that. Some would say. I'm sorry? I said some would say.
04:11: Well, the word primates means something entirely different in the Anglican church, and we'll find out exactly what that is.
04:17: But first of all, tell us something about Glenquarry Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia.
04:24: Oh, sure. So, Glenquarry Anglican Church is in two suburbs in the very southwest of Sydney, Glenfield and Macquarie Fields.
04:33: It is an area of high social disadvantage, and so the church here is dealing with a number of issues.
04:39: We have a charity on site called Break the Cycle Glenquarry, where we're helping local people for whom life is hard.
04:46: Almost 40 % of one of my suburbs lives in housing commission housing, government housing provided for them, and there's all the usual social things that go on with that.
04:54: And so we're seeking to reach out to people with practical need and practical help. But, of course, we're doing that in order to build a bridge to tell them about the great help that Jesus brings them through what he did on the cross and in his resurrection.
05:09: So it's a very different church to the churches I've been at before. I'm an Englishman. I'm an upper middle class
05:14: Englishman. I was born up on the north side of a city in England, and my previous placement in parishes, both lay and ordained, has been in, how shall
05:25: I say, very nice places. But I'm really loving it out here. It's very different to people. I think people do ministry in areas like this find that the people are very real.
05:34: There's no facade. We cut to the chase very, very quickly, and so actually that means that in one sense gospel ministry is easier because people will talk about things.
05:45: In another sense, it's harder because there's no established understanding of church going or of the cultural
05:53: Christianity here. It is dead, except for the Roman Catholics across the road.
05:59: They churn them out every Sunday morning, but it's still the Protestant church going. It's culturally dead here, and so we're starting from ground zero, which
06:07: I think makes it more exciting. And as I was discussing with you before the program began, a lot of people who are outside of Anglicanism or Episcopalianism, all they know about the
06:23: Anglican and Episcopal church is that many of their congregations are either on one extreme totally liberal apostate.
06:34: They may have a homosexual rector or minister or a rector who applauds that behavior or marries same -sex couples or may even, like Bishop Spong, who debated our mutual friend
06:52: Dr. James R. White, Bishop Spong, who not only married two men and two women if they requested that, he also denied the pillars of the
07:02: Christian faith, such as the deity of Christ and the bodily resurrection of Christ and many other of the pinnacle truths.
07:11: Now, that's the common view that many evangelicals or fundamentalists will have of Anglicans and Episcopalians.
07:19: And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have many in the Church of Rome who will just view the
07:26: Anglican church as either a church started by a lustful rebel named
07:32: King Henry VIII, and there is no legitimate ground to have this denomination even exist because it was based purely on his desires to have a divorce when the
07:43: Church of Rome would not grant him one. And many others who are more ecumenical just view the
07:51: Anglican church as a heartbeat away from coming home to Mother Rome. So perhaps you could give us, our listeners, a description of the
08:00: Anglican church that they may be totally unaware of and some of the rich history of Reformed theology that comes out of its heritage.
08:14: Absolutely. So as with all things, the actual history is far more interesting and probably slightly more complicated than the crude caricatures we often have.
08:24: So there's no doubt that the precursor for Reformation in the Church of England was
08:29: King Henry VIII and his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry a young girl called
08:35: Anne Boleyn. And people will have different opinions on how much it was simply lost on his part.
08:44: It was more complicated than that. Henry had actually married his brother's wife. His brother died early.
08:50: Henry had never expected to be king. His older brother was going to be king, but then he died and he left his wife without children.
08:59: And Henry saw it as his duty to take his brother's wife and raise children, but also in order to cement the political alliance that had been forged with Aragon in Spain through the marriage of his brother to Catherine of Aragon.
09:14: So he married Catherine and he becomes king, but Catherine can't give him a boy.
09:21: She gives him one girl, Mary, can't give him a boy, and Henry becomes slowly convinced that this is the cause.
09:27: He's married his brother's wife and he shouldn't have done it. And so whether he's convincing himself because it's something else that he wants or whatever, you never can tell these things.
09:36: But there is a certain conviction to it about it. And of course, he goes to the Pope and the Pope goes, there is no way that you can do this.
09:45: And so Henry then is a bit put out. And at the time, politically, there's a big debate about the power of the
09:51: Pope anyway, over politics and over the affairs of kings. And Henry is basically at the point where he goes,
09:58: I have had enough. And so he essentially says, the Pope has no power in this country.
10:04: I am the, I'm not the king, I am the emperor of England and the
10:09: Pope has no power. And so he basically, he doesn't just divorce Catherine. He essentially divorces the church in England from the church in Rome.
10:19: But at that point, there is little, if no theological reformation. Henry dies a convinced
10:26: Roman Catholic in theology. When he does reform a church, he institutes six articles, all of which are, they're papers, they're
10:34: Romans, there's no doubt about it. And so you've got a bunch of Protestants who have been working under him and with him, slowly kind of changed things, like getting the
10:43: Bible, getting the English and churches and things like that. But nothing really happened until Henry died.
10:50: But when he died, 1647, the next in line is his boy, the boy he's finally given by his third wife, who becomes
10:58: Edward VI. But Edward is a hemophiliac. And he's a young, sickly boy.
11:03: He's about eight or nine years old when he comes to the throne. And his advisors and his people looking after him, they're
11:11: Protestants. They're hardcore reformed Protestants. They've drunk on lupus, and they love it.
11:17: And they set about reforming the Church of England. And within two years, you have the first Book of Common Prayer, the 1549
11:25: Book of Common Prayer, which is Protestant. It's not perfect. Still, the great canon in the middle is a bit of a mess, and they haven't quite worked out where things should go.
11:35: But Cranmer in particular, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed by Henry VIII himself, because Cranmer wrote the legal opinion that allowed
11:44: Henry to divorce Catherine Cranmer, pushes out the 1549. And then in consultation with men like Bucer, and he's consulting with Calvin as well in Europe, but very much influenced by the
11:57: European reformers, they push out the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, which is a fantastically reformed
12:06: Protestant prayer book. I mean, it is just, it is precise. They have all the prayers in the right order.
12:12: They take, you know, even the saying of the Lord's Prayer. Make sure that you never say the Lord's Prayer when the elements are on the table.
12:19: So, you know, they've got to be distributed. The confession is taken away from, again, from the table for the confession stands very clearly before we even begin to say a prayer of consecration at the table, because of course, they're fighting all the time against any consequence of the
12:34: Roman mass in communion. And they get through this great prayer book, the 1552, there's acts of uniformity, so that we get the
12:42: Bible read in English, and the Protestant religion established. And then in 1553,
12:48: Edward dies. He's very sick. He takes over from him, and he's a very young man.
12:55: He's still a boy, really. He dies, and then Mary comes to the throne, Catherine's daughter, and she's a staunch
13:00: Roman Catholic, and actually gets married to Philip II of Spain. And she is known as Bloody Mary, after which we get the cocktail named, and with good reason.
13:10: Because she sets out on a vicious, a vicious persecution of Protestants. All the main bishops who have led the
13:17: Reformation, the ones that were convinced they're either executed or flee to the surface of the continent.
13:24: But Mary dies in about five years. But it's pretty, pretty brutal. And then her half -sister,
13:31: Elizabeth, who's a great woman, comes to the throne in 1558.
13:37: And within a year, we have a new act of uniformity, which brings us back to our reformed
13:43: Protestant heritage, and a new prayer book gets brought out. The third and that article are finalized, 42 before they're finalized.
13:50: And we have essentially a Protestant Church of England. But Elizabeth has seen the carnage of the last 10 years, and she refuses to do that.
14:05: And so she refuses to have extremes. And so she sets out pursuing what's known as the
14:11: Anglican Via Media, the middle way, where she's got the Puritans on one side, and the much more softer, sort of gentler
14:20: Catholics on another side. And she's set out for a middle way of Protestantism, which really is where we end up.
14:27: And it's a very English, polite way of doing it. She has an act of uniformity. And she does say we've got to test the clergy to say that they believe.
14:36: But she has a very strange rule. She says, we'll ask three times. On the first time, you get a slap on the wrist.
14:43: On the second time, if the clergy won't assess you for the truth of the Reformation, the truth of the
14:48: Bible, that there'll be some sort of censure, probably put in prison for a while. And she actually says, legalizes, she actually says, on the third time, we'll execute you, which is what they did in those days.
14:58: And then she says to her inquisitors, I don't ever want you to ask for the third time. So you have this establishment of Protestant religion officially as the established
15:08: Church of England. And yet we've added this point where it's never quite properly enforced.
15:15: It's there, it's legislated, it's the law of the land, she believes it, and it's pushing along, but there aren't the sanctions in the world before, which means that in the next century, when the
15:25: Laudians come along, they're a little bit more high churchy, they're kind of like their candles and their ritual. It bleeds the other way to the point where the king really gets accused of being a
15:35: Roman Catholic, and we have our Second Civil War over that. In the 18th century, we have the influx of liberalism, and that sweeps through, that switch to the church, first intellectualism, and then in the 19th century, more and more just straight theological liberalism, we'll be familiar with today.
15:53: In reaction to that in the 19th century, also you get the Oxford movement, which really looks to Rome now, and to the early church fathers, as they understand them, who have some sort of more
16:04: Roman stuff, and that's led by guys like, you may have heard of Henry Newman, who actually becomes Cardinal Henry Newman of the
16:11: Roman Catholic Church, so he has the integrity to realize that his position can't hold.
16:17: But he does lay a bit of a seed for liberalism as well, because he writes a number of tracts, including the famous tract 90, where he goes through the third man article,
16:27: I think like our Theological Constitution, and he says, well, you can read them a different way, and so he actually opens up the door, ironically, for liberals to go, ah, well, you can read it another way, and so we come sweeping, therefore, into the 20th century, with a whole bunch of streams of religious thought in the
16:46: Church of England. You've got the classic Protestants, who just hold to the way it always was, and you can think of great men like Mac Whitfield and J .C.
16:58: Ryle, the famous Bishop of Liverpool and the Evangelical in the end of the 19th century. You've got your liberals doing their liberal thing, you've got the high church men now, who do often look like Roman Catholics at first sight, although they do have some disagreements with Rome over some things, and they all come sweeping into the 20th century, and then, at the same time, you've got to remember that Britain, Britannia, has ruled the way, to quote the
17:24: Protestants. So you've gone out and established an empire, while all this is going on, and so, as she goes out, missionaries go out from the
17:30: Church of England, and they take with them their different flavours of churchmanship, and so forth.
17:35: The first missionaries are always usually Evangelicals, because it's only Evangelicals that will go on the first boat.
17:40: So the first chaplain here in Australia, for example, was an Evangelical man, who preached a cracking sermon here when he arrived on the shores of Australia, and established an
17:52: Evangelical ministry, and as you go out into the countryside here in New South Wales, it's very interesting, the first original church buildings, they look very much like Protestant meeting houses, and nothing more, but then by the early 19th century, the 1820s, the 1830s, 1840s, you see second church buildings built out in the country, and they look much more like the
18:13: Tractarius ones. It's not a table anymore, you have an altar, and it's all, you know, all the finer, only the altar rails and everything else, and so Australia is a great example of how the empire spread, the communion spread, and now we're here today, and we've got all these
18:30: Anglican churches all around the world, who have what really is an organic relationship, one to another, which we've never really properly formalized, and each in their own country has developed according to both their original theological influences and the flavour of the day.
18:49: Now if you're in America, then you probably know the Episcopal Church, and the Episcopal Church is just drunk
18:54: Western secularist Kool -Aid, and that's why we've got the Wackadoodle stuff, that's the precise theological term for where they're at, we've got that kind of stuff that they're doing, and so you've got
19:07: Bishops' Pies, and Bishops' Song, and the rejection of basic Christian truth, and then of course the consecration of a man in an active homosexual relationship,
19:16: Gene Robinson, in 2003, which kicked off the current crisis, and so that's the presenting issue for us is sexuality, but the underlying issue for a long, long time has been where is the authority in the
19:28: Church, is it according to the original articles of religion, is it in the scriptures, or is it somewhere else, and so it's all the great theological debates about liberalism and so forth, all played out on a slightly polite tea and cake, afternoon tea religion.
19:47: It's fascinating, and here we are today, we're finally trying to get stuff sorted out, and uh, yeah that was excellent, and I just want to announce our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, it's chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
20:07: c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com, please include your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the
20:18: USA, I do know that we have a number of Sydney Australian residents that listen fairly regularly to Iron Sharpens Iron, I don't know how often they listen live, but I know that they listen to recorded programs and respond to me via email very often, and communicate with me, and I'm hoping that some of them are listening live today, but we do have listeners all over the globe, so please let us know where you're emailing from if you have a question.
20:47: chrisarnsen at gmail .com, going back to the 39 articles which you really glossed over very quickly, that's a very profound, uh, reformed confessional statement, it's clearly
21:00: Calvinistic, and it's also clearly in opposition to the idolatry and heresies of Rome, is that, are the 39 articles, even if most
21:11: Anglicans and Episcopalians don't follow them, is it still the official confession of the
21:17: Anglican Church? It depends which province you're in, we're divided up into almost 40 provinces, so for example
21:24: I'm in the province of the Anglican Church of Australia, and depending which province you're in depends on what official position the articles of religion have.
21:31: Here in Australia there are, as in many provinces, our constitution says that there are official doctrines, so that's great when we, um, having our own debates within the
21:41: Anglican Church in Australia, it's good for us to say what the constitution says, say what our doctrine is, what the doctrine is, um, so we're not the ones who are on the outside here.
21:52: Places like the Episcopal Church have essentially gone, they're a nice historical document, they tell us about our past, and in the
22:01: Church of England, the status is a little bit unclear, so when you get ordained in the Church of England you kind of promise that you uphold them, but the question now is, am
22:09: I upholding them as a historical document, am I upholding them as actually what I believe? It's a bit of a fudge.
22:16: Now across, um, across the wider Anglican community, because as pro -members Westerners, we always think of the world in terms of the
22:22: West, and we think of, I mean, Americans, I love America, I spent a lot of time there, I was very there for a year, did some road tripping there a while ago, so I love your country, but gosh, you are rather short -sighted, aren't you?
22:34: You can't see, you can't see the world, you can't see the world beyond the Florida Keys. And Chris, if you haven't had a sip down, if you like when you're drinking your coffee, put your cup down, but there is a world outside America, and in that world, which is the rest of the world, which is the vast majority of people in the world, um,
22:59: Anglicans tend to hold to the third line articles as their statement of faith, of belief, it's where we've always been, and any of your listeners who are, particularly those who are reformed, should have a little read -through, and I think they'll go, yeah, yeah, you know what's great about the third line articles?
23:16: They are solidly reformed, but they're not as long to read through as the Westminster Confession. That's right, they're very abbreviated, and interestingly...
23:24: Which seems to me to be the perfect thing. Well, and interestingly enough, interestingly enough, a reformed
23:32: Baptist could actually adhere to the 39 articles, because... And so he should.
23:40: Well, when it comes to baptism, it only says that children should not be forbidden baptism, it doesn't say anything about infants.
23:49: Yes, that's absolutely true, and so, you see, the reformed Baptists, they did so well when they, when they, when they were reformed
23:56: Baptists. It's a shame that James White isn't on the show today, isn't it? Because that would be, he and I have done some research together, and he does tease me gently on it.
24:04: Yes, so the Anglican position on paedo -baptism is the classical reformed position, a position held by Cranmer and other positions that we've backed by the children of believers, and we'll not have that debate now, but yeah, the whole thing leads to the very solidly 16th century reformed document, and since the
24:22: Bible is God's unchanging word, what's held true in the 16th century holds true today, at least that's our position, and the position of many, many
24:30: Anglicans, the vast majority of Anglicans around the world, it's just that some people don't want to believe that anymore, and most of them are in the church in the
24:38: West. And Thomas Cranmer was the individual who drafted the 39 articles, is he not?
24:47: Yes, so the original draft from him, of course, he was dead when the final articles of religion were agreed upon in 1662, he'd been killed under Mary's reign, but yeah, he set about drafting the original, which reads 42, and if you read your 1662 prayer book, you can see some of them there.
25:07: He was really the architect of all round of the Protestant reformation in England, he was a lonely curate when he provided the legal opinion for Henry to divorce
25:21: Catherine he did a bit of a tour of Europe, trying to understand the law, and how people thought, and make the situations came back, and it had the legal piece drafted up, and of course
25:31: Henry had had real difficulties with his current Archbishop of Canterbury, and got rid of him, and made
25:37: Cranmer Archbishop instead, and then Cranmer was somewhat frustrated under Henry, there was really very little that he could do,
25:46: Henry was a sort of Catholic believer, in fact to this day, we have the legacy of that on our coins, and in our monarchy, if you take any
25:55: British coin, and look at the picture of the Sovereign and the Queen, you'll see round the side, some little initials,
26:03: Reg for Regina, Dei Gratia, by the grace of God, and then, six and eleven,
26:10: Sid, Death, which stands for Sidi, Descender of the Faith, which was, now you'll love this
26:17: Chris, which was an award, a title, given by the Pope, to Henry VIII, for a treatise he wrote against Martin Luther, so on our coins is embedded, and in the title of the monarch today, is embedded a title for Pope Gaius, for being a good
26:33: Roman Catholic, which the Protestant monarch of England, Frank, hangs on to, Henry said,
26:38: I'm keeping that, I'm still the defender of the faith, so he defended the Roman Catholic faith, but Cramner was mooshed once Henry was dead, and he and other men got on with Roman atrocity, and they had a lot of time to prepare.
26:53: And a very fascinating story, which I'm amazed that I've never seen a movie about Cramner, but he originally, when
27:02: Rome held power again, in the Church of England, he, out of fear for his life, recanted his
27:09: Protestant beliefs, but then later, out of just obviously guilt, being wracked by guilt that he had betrayed the true faith of the scriptures, and of Christ, he recanted his recantation, and asked that the hand that signed the recantation initially would be burned first, before he was burned alive.
27:36: Yes, a great story, and Fox's Book of Markers records it, and it's Fox's inimitable style, so there may be some slight embellishments there, but it's actually very well worth reading the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, who were martyred a year before, and they were burned together at the stake, and at the stake, these are great words,
27:56: I'm going to try to remember them off by heart, Latimer, as he tied to the stake with Ridley, said to Ridley, play the man,
28:02: Mr. Ridley, and we shall stay like such a candle in England, but by God's grace shall never be put out.
28:10: And so, just some great heroes. Fox's Book of Markers is really worth reading, it's a book of that time, and what
28:19: Fox used to do is show the Protestant martyrs in the line of the great martyrs of the past.
28:24: So he writes about all the ancient martyrs of the early church and the early day in the same field.
28:35: So, a slight embellishment of some stuff, but also some great, some great, great, great scenes in it.
28:41: Cranmer at his final trial before his execution, railing against the
28:47: Pope, absolutely brilliant, well worth reading, no matter what side of the debate you're on, it's a rip -roar of a novel for me.
28:54: Yes, and for anybody listening who wants to get an mp3 of an interview
29:00: I did a number of years ago on the old Iron Sharpens Iron, I spent a whole hour with Dr.
29:06: Ashley Null, who just stayed on the one subject of Cranmer and his doctrine of repentance, and as you know,
29:18: Dr. Null is one of the foremost Cranmer scholars alive today. He is,
29:25: Ashley is a good friend, and Ashley came out here to Australia last year and gave us a fantastic series of lectures in a conference that a number of us were at, again looking at Cranmer and his whole doctrine of repentance, and also his attitude to those who persecuted him.
29:42: Cranmer really understood the other chief very well, he was very convinced that we would win people over by loving them and speaking the truth to them, and he did that in a time when men were burned at the stake for what they believed, so Ashley Null is well worth getting hold of.
29:57: His book, his doctrine is turned into a book, I think Cranmer and the doctrine of repentance is well worth the read.
30:04: Yes, and it'll be great when it gets republished where it's at a much more affordable price than Oxford Press.
30:12: Absolutely, absolutely. We're going to be going to a break right now, and we do have a couple of listeners waiting for you to answer their questions.
30:23: Ted from Tuscaloosa, Alabama is one, and we'll get to your question next
30:30: Ted, so thanks for your patience. But we're going to be right back after these messages, so don't go away, we'll be right back with David Old and his discussion on the state and future of the
30:42: Anglican and Episcopal Church, and also his assessment of primates 2016.
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33:30: Call Lindbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402 or visit lindbrookbaptist .org.
33:40: That's lindbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns and if you just tuned into Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today for the two hours is
33:48: Reverend David Old, who is Rector of the Glen Quarry Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia.
33:55: He happens to be calling us live right now from Sydney where it is Tuesday morning,
34:03: January 19th. But here in the states on the east coast, it is just about 4 .30
34:09: p .m. eastern time. And we are discussing the state and future of the
34:17: Anglican Church and Episcopal Church. And we're also going to have him give his assessment of Primates 2016, which was an event held in London that has great importance to the state and future of the
34:30: Anglican and Episcopal Church. And before I go to our questioner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, you said that you believe that Henry VIII went to his death a convinced
34:43: Roman Catholic, even though he was the architect of the
34:50: British Reformation. According to Dr.
34:55: Null, Cranmer at least believed on his deathbed that Henry may have at least embraced justification by faith alone by squeezing his hand, by squeezing
35:08: Cranmer's hand when he asked him the question about that. Do you think that that's folklore or did that really happen in your opinion?
35:17: Look, well, Ashley would be the best judge of what Cranmer had said.
35:22: His current doctrine is to claim that all Cranmer's unpublished material. Look, I don't know if you've been at a deathbed with someone,
35:30: Chris. I certainly in my job have the privilege of being at people's deathbeds. And one thing that I will always do is preach the gospel to them and elicit a response.
35:43: Now, I'm a Reformed man, so it's up to God what he wants to do at that point, and God is gracious and will do as he sees fit.
35:50: But there's nothing like death, is there, to clarify the mind. So it could very well be that on his death that Henry certainly placed his trust in the work of Christ alone, as opposed to any of his own merit.
36:05: I don't think that would change the history so much, because what we're actually talking about is
36:11: Henry being, if you like, the man who structurally got the Reformation going by flicking from the church in Rome.
36:19: By doing that, even by maintaining his Catholic sensibilities and piety, he set up a system whereby the church itself could then execute its own
36:29: Reformation. What's unique about the Reformation in England is that it is a top -down Reformation. Most of the
36:35: Reformations across Europe were bottom -up. Luther was just a monk. Calvin, rather, was just one guy from the bottom -up.
36:44: But in England, you actually had from the monarchy downwards, a Reformation put in place.
36:50: And because of the things that Henry did, even while not really being a convicted Protestant, even though he may, on his deathbed, have converted, despite that, because of the things that he did, he had a structural
37:00: Reformation, if you like, that allowed a proper religious Reformation after his death. All right.
37:07: We do have Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who writes, though Mr. Old is
37:13: Australian, I know from inside sources he is well -versed in TEC, the
37:19: Episcopal Church in America, which has recently elected its first black presiding bishop,
37:27: Michael Curry. I'm wondering if Mr. Old could give his assessment of the previous presiding bishop,
37:34: Catherine Jefferts Scorey, or Shorey, and the brief tenure of her successor,
37:45: Bishop Curry. Sure. So I'm an Englishman, Chris, so there are times when
37:52: I'm temperate and restrained in my language. I'm going to soften my approach on presiding bishop
38:00: Catherine Jefferts Scorey, former bishop of Arkansas, and then elected as presiding bishop at a very stormy general convention of the
38:08: Episcopal Church. Here's my measured temperate assessment of her, an out -and -out heretic.
38:16: She really was a terrible... I mean, setting aside the fact that she was a woman who was a bishop, and there's arguments about that, of course, and I think that's really clear -cut, but she basically trampled every major doctrine of the
38:32: Christian Church. She took a Palatian position, she took Gnostic positions, she...
38:37: It was just... It was the spirit of the age writ large. She preached sermons that were just appalling.
38:43: For example, she preached that classic scene in, I think it's Acts 16, where Paul frees the slave girl.
38:50: Do you remember the slave girl who can prophesy? Yes, the medium, yeah. And that's right, and the traitors are making money from her.
38:58: And of course, Paul comes and gloriously frees her, and she preached that text one day when it came up in the lectionary, as Paul stymieing her gift.
39:11: Just... You know, when you've got the presiding bishop of the Church saying that the exorcism of a demon is actually the stymieing of gifts, it's not that you've jumped off the deep end, it's just that you're already plunging down the
39:28: Inca trench next to... What's that big trench next to South America that just keeps going and going and going? She's long gone down there.
39:35: Plus, so theologically, she was just a shower. But also in terms of the
39:43: Anglican wars, if you'd like to call them in, in the United States, she was nasty. There was no other word for it.
39:49: The Episcopal Church started breaking up properly in 2003. They appointed Jude Robinson, an openly gay man in a homosexual relationship, a man who left his wife and children, and then set up shop with a man who was also an alcoholic.
40:04: It turned out afterwards, sadly, tragically these things often come together. So the
40:11: Episcopal Church was breaking up, and you had people, parishes in good conscience, leaving, just saying, look, we can no longer sit on our bishops when he approved of these things, quite rightly so.
40:21: There's been enough heresy propagated in the Episcopal Church. And under Jessica Scurry, there was a vicious, there's no other word for it, a vicious persecution of anybody that left.
40:34: She had to start a policy that they would not let people leave their buildings, and they sued everybody.
40:41: So a good friend of mine, a guy called Matt Kennedy in Binghampton, New York State, he and I have blogged together on the website
40:47: Stanfermanfaith .com for many, many years. He was in the
40:53: Diocese of Central New York, and he and his wardens were negotiating in good faith with their bishops, with Adams, were negotiating a way of just disentangling themselves from the diocese, and it was all going very, very well.
41:08: And in comes Scurry, and the line comes down from the very, very top. They, you know, you shall not pass.
41:15: And the diocese ended up suing them, and they lost their building, they lost everything. And there were countless parishes and even whole dioceses across the country who were trying to disaffiliate, and she was just vicious.
41:28: The legal bill, to this day, we're not quite sure how much was spent in legal costs by the
41:35: Episcopal Church chasing buildings. And to what end? The former church building of the
41:40: Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghampton, the former church building which Matthew's block were in, it's now an
41:48: Islamic education centre, which is code word, you and I know, for a mosque. It's now a run -down building.
41:54: The cross has been removed, the painted glass has broken in the back, and he's actually in the building that's twice the size, and he needs it because his congregation has doubled.
42:02: So God has been very gracious. But Jeffert Scurry was nothing if not terrible for the church.
42:09: She crystallised their liberalism, and she pursued viciously anybody they wanted to leave.
42:16: And they sought to depose everybody as well. So, you know, anybody that remotely said, look,
42:21: I'm not quite happy with this, they go, oh, you've obviously renounced your holy orders, you're deposed.
42:26: It was just, it was brutal, it was absolutely brutal. But out of that has flourished the Anglican Church in North America, which is, if you like, a parallel jurisdiction that's now covering both the
42:37: United States and Canada, where similar things have happened. And look, the Anglican Church in North America is not perfect. Again, there's a reformed man with his friends and slavers in there that I'm not wholly happy with.
42:48: But they love the Lord Jesus Christ. They love his word. They're doing their best to live faithfully.
42:55: The current presiding bishop of the private Anglican Church in North America, the ACMA, is a good and godly man,
43:01: Tony Beach. He was actually at the private meeting. He was invited recently in Canterbury. He's an evangelical, not quite in the flavour that some of us low -church men would recognise, but he's an evangelical nevertheless.
43:13: And finally, this gospel leadership in the whole Anglican Church in North America, once again, is a distinctly great thankfulness.
43:22: And we do have a listener in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Harrison, who wants to know, it seems that the vast majority of conservatives within the
43:36: Anglican Communion are from the Oxford movement, who are very Romish in their beliefs.
43:43: How much fellowship can you, as a historically
43:50: Protestant Anglican who truly believes in the doctrines of grace, have with such papists within the
43:59: Anglican Church, even though they may be fighting against the same liberals that you oppose?
44:06: That was Timothy, was it, in Mechanicsburg? That's a great name for a city. That's a great question.
44:13: And one that actually presses upon the Orthodox movement in the Anglican Communion today.
44:19: So we have a new structure which we call the Fellowship of Protestant Anglicans, or the GACOM movement, the
44:24: Global Anglican Future Conference. We've had two GACOMs so far, one in Jerusalem in 2008 and one in Nairobi in 2013, and I was privileged to be a part of that second one.
44:35: And yes, our friend is right, amongst us we have conservative Anglicans, some of whom are classical evangelicals, some of whom are very reformed evangelicals, some of whom are
44:47: Tractarians, they are Oxford movement. They're not as big, the
44:52: Oxford movement are not as big globally as perhaps you perceive around you. There is a big, strong Oxford movement within the
45:00: Anglican Church in North America, the ACNA. More globally, you see some of the church -manship of the
45:06: Oxford movement, but not necessarily the strongly held beliefs. Like I said earlier, the second wave of missionaries that went out, who we might call the civilising missionaries, who came to institute more church order than just more gospel, a lot of those in the 19th century, mid -19th century, were
45:24: Oxford movement men, and they did institute a lot of practice in Africa and East Asia, Southeast Asia, which has stayed to today.
45:34: But I think one of the things that you've got to learn about the Anglican Church is that the axes that you think things can be measured on are the continuum of high church to evangelical and again high church to liberal, and that the church practice that comes with it often isn't the way you'd expect it to be.
45:54: So you do have to get some evangelicals, many of them in fact, who dress as you and I might understand the high church must address, but whose churchmanship is slightly different again.
46:04: So you've got to take each one as it comes. So I'd say, yeah, in the Anglican Church there are some high churchmen, there are some
46:13: Tractarians as well, another word they use for the Oxford Movement guys, but that's two different things. Now, how do I fit with them?
46:19: Well, at the GATCON conference in Jerusalem in 2008, we produced what we call the
46:26: Jerusalem Declaration. Which affirms again the third man article in the
46:31: Book of Common Fact. So we take, look, I take, and you might call this a fudge, but then Anglicans are famous for fudging things, you might call this a fudge, but I think it's a mixture of integrity.
46:42: I say, look, I can sign up to that wholeheartedly. If a Tractarian comes along and he is prepared, willingly, to sign up wholeheartedly to the
46:51: Jerusalem Declaration, what am I to say at that point? Hard to know. If it helps set your mind at ease slightly,
46:59: I'm not here to defend Tractarianism at all, I share all the concerns about it that I think are set up first of all in the third man article, and then afterwards in the evangelical response to Tractarianism in the 19th century.
47:10: But if it helps you, I did an interview a few years ago, two, two and a half years ago, at the
47:16: Nairobi conference, with a man called Jack Eicher. Jack is the Bishop of Fort Worth in Texas.
47:23: He is a high church man, there is no doubt about it. He's an Oxford movement man. I did an audio interview with him for about 25 minutes.
47:30: I said to my friend from Mechanicsburg, I forgot the state, I said to my friend from Mechanicsburg, I said, go listen to that interview, listen to how the man articulates himself, and ask yourself if he's a brother or not.
47:45: And it's an interesting question to ask. And I think you'd be hard -pressed coming away saying he's not a brother.
47:54: Although, certainly, I'd be happy to say, because he's the kind of man who will take it in good spirit, I'm happy to say
48:00: I think he's in serious error about some of his practice. But I'd be hard -pressed to say he's not a brother.
48:05: And look, we don't despise the very small things, I think is another thing I'd say as well. We don't want to despise the very small things.
48:12: It's been a long, hard fight in North America in particular against the liberalism of bishops, anti -gospel liberalism of the
48:21: Episcopal Church. And so we have some strange best -sellers at the moment. But we've learned to try what's most important, and get on with it.
48:32: We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says,
48:38: I heard you mention earlier the very liberal female bishop whose beliefs you despised.
48:48: But are there female in the clergy in the Anglican and Episcopal Church who are otherwise theologically conservative, and how do you fellowship with them even though the
49:00: Bible prohibits women in leadership in the church, especially according to the
49:07: Apostle Paul? Thanks, Arnie. Great question. Yeah, I'm very conservative on this issue myself.
49:15: And so I'm with you in terms of where I think you're coming from as well. We do have female clergy.
49:22: But we've got female clergy, first of all, in Sydney. So when I was deacon, made a deacon, to the first stage of ordination in the
49:29: Anglican Church, I was ordained with 48 other people of whom almost 10 were women.
49:36: Now, interestingly enough, that was more women than were ordained in the whole year, the rest of Australia, where there's a cry on us for being down on women's ministry.
49:44: So I've had no problem with women being ordained to the diaconess, and certainly no problem with women teaching other women and doing so well.
49:53: I know many gifted women who were able to teach, which of course is a key issue in the Anglican ministry, not just administration. However, there are people of different convictions all around, and particularly, again, in the
50:06: ACNA, Anglican Church of North America, and even amongst other evangelicals in England, whom you might know, and even here in Australia.
50:15: There are some evangelical women who are not convicts of this issue, and have gone the other way. How do I work with them?
50:21: Well, I recognize first and foremost that I don't think it's a gospel issue. So I don't see the scriptures anywhere saying, this sends people to hell.
50:30: Now, on sexuality, of course, the scriptures are abundantly clear, aren't they, on a number of occasions, that sexuality is an issue, and particularly in moral and sexual practice, it's an issue that is not repented of and takes people to hell.
50:41: On this one, I don't see it quite there. And so I think that tempers the way that we respond.
50:49: So I think each man has to decide what he does with his conscience. But you can't just shun someone.
50:56: An archbishop I knew a while ago said, look, if I went to a church and there was a woman preaching, I don't think
51:01: I'd get up and get out. I don't think there's any need to make a fuss about that. It just wouldn't be my church of choice in the future.
51:08: So look, we get on. We recognize that where people are gospel people. I think this is one thing I want to say above all. Recognize where people are gospel people.
51:16: And then ask yourself, is the thing they're getting wrong, is it a denial of the gospel itself?
51:22: And if it's not, then I'm going to have to learn to live with some things that I don't like. Now, are the implications of getting ministry, gender ministry, wrong?
51:31: Are the implications of being a gospel? Yes, I do. I actually think that putting women in leadership in churches ultimately undermines the very issue of refining on human sexuality.
51:40: Because it's an insane -baked issue. I honestly think that, and I've had that discussion with Paul's people. Yeah, because of the hermeneutics.
51:48: It's just the same. That is a vast inconsistency in saying we read one thing one way, another thing another way.
51:54: Because the problem is that men and women are different. So I get that, and I'm prepared to argue the case.
51:59: Those who know me will know that I'm quite happy to argue the case when I want to. But at the same time, let's be clear about what the
52:05: Scripture says is a sense of people's how and what doesn't. And let's show a little bit of grace and charity.
52:15: And gosh, people who know me well will laugh at me for saying this, because apparently I'm a bit of a sight picker myself.
52:21: But let's look at where to pick your sides and where not to. And so I would say the line is just the other side of that issue.
52:28: It's an important issue, don't get me wrong. And in the church where I'm responsible for what goes on, we work that one out in our own way.
52:36: I have only men in the church service, and only men preaching. And that's a lot of the way that it is here.
52:43: And that's just where I'm generally convinced. We have important people about it, and we function fine. And of course, part of that is teaching men to lead properly, which is sacrificial service.
52:51: So proper patriarchy is sacrificial service of those entrusted to us, isn't it? So that's not a bad thing.
52:58: And so we get that right. But yeah, I think just be careful about the fights that we're picking, and how we pick them.
53:06: It could just be that as men in the church, we'd be distracted by other things. But there'll be more important things when we try to get them right as well.
53:14: And look, I've sat in discussion groups with general sinners here in Australia with female evangelical bishops.
53:21: And they've been lovely. They've treated me with grace. I've been polite in treating them with grace. And we've known what we've said.
53:28: But that's the way it is. When people who articulate the gospel clearly get secondary stuff wrong, we've got to work out what we're going to do.
53:37: And we've managed to hold together an evangelical church. Well, sometimes what I see, you know, a third Baptist church on the left -hand side of the main street on this half of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, because that's the only town
53:48: I can remember now. I wonder maybe we've had a split. We've had a split too far somewhere, haven't we? But I'm not sure.
53:54: It could just be I'm a raving heretic as well, Chris. We do have a listener from Long Island, New York.
54:03: CJ from Lindenhurst, New York, wants to know, you mentioned something about the divide between high church and low church in the
54:14: Anglican communion. Can you be a little bit more descriptive on the difference? Sure.
54:20: Hello, CJ. Um, a high church man, uh, what I want you to think is, um, certainly going to be quick, called bells and smells, or, uh, or high, we often say often high up the candlestick.
54:33: Uh, they will, uh, it's best to hear people on their own terms, I think. It's easy to caricature someone. I think it's important to listen to them on their own terms.
54:40: So a high churchman in the Church of England will be a softly Protestant churchman.
54:47: That's important to hear. He'll be softly Protestant, but he will express his churchmanship, and particularly how he goes through the service.
54:55: In what will look to you and I, in our stark raving, southern Baptist or puritanical, we'll look to it like they're cousins of the
55:06: Pope. Um, there'll be rose, there'll be candles on the table. They may even call the table an altar.
55:12: You and I will shut up, but that's what they'll do. Um, uh, and yet, uh, you know, there'll be rose and candles.
55:19: There may even be a bit of incense, there's a smell. Uh, the bell is, is your pretty, your pretty Romish, uh, guy.
55:26: The bell, of course, is the bell, that consecration of the elements, the signal that the Holy Spirit has arrived, in case anybody missed him arriving.
55:32: Um, and, um, uh, sorry, I caricature that. That's not fair. There are, there's men of good integrity, uh,
55:38: I know in the Anglican Church. I can think of one guy right now in another darkness that I know very, very well. He and I disagree regularly on churchmanship.
55:46: Um, we give each other a hard time in church. But God, I tell you, Chris, he is fighting the fight hard. Where he is, is that he's doing his very best at the understanding of the gospel, the teacher, and he's calling sinners to salvation in faith alone in Jesus Christ.
55:59: He's not for a minute teaching them all their good work, getting them to heaven, um, or anywhere else for that matter.
56:06: Uh, and, uh, and so the high churchmen are going to look, they're going to look a little bit like the other Catholics to, uh, to you and I, TJ.
56:12: Uh, but if you sit down and have a cup of tea with them, which would be a very classical Anglican thing to do, or a gin and tonic, of course, if you're that way inclined.
56:19: Uh, or sherry in the South, perhaps. Uh, then, um, you would hear some strong articulations of justification by faith alone.
56:26: You'd hear them speaking against the authority of the Pope. Uh, it's just that they get all dressed up on Sunday morning.
56:34: I can, I can put it. Um, yeah. Now, now, uh,
56:40: I'm assuming you are a low churchman. Uh, I remember years ago, it may have been as long ago as the late 1980s, early 1990s, but I was at the 10th
56:51: Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology.
56:57: And there was a low Anglican Calvinist minister from Australia.
57:03: I believe it may have been St. Matthew's Church, but I can't remember for certain.
57:09: But this, this brother was... It was a priest, possibly. Okay, that, and this brother was actually speaking against even the wearing of clerical garments and collars.
57:20: Uh, how, how prevalent is that in the low church? Well, I'll tell you what, um,
57:25: I'm standing here today in jeans and, and a shirt, and where I am in the
57:32: Southwest of Sydney, um, which is an incredibly mostly working class, very relaxed area,
57:38: I will wear this same jeans and a dress shirt on Sunday morning. Now, for some of you, now, that's, that's lower than maybe some of your
57:45: Baptists listening. Yes. I wouldn't dream of not, of, yeah, not wearing even a pair of chinos or something on a
57:51: Sunday morning. Uh, the principle there is that, um, I am one beggar leading other beggars to the table.
57:57: So if you're going to reject clerical garb on the basis that I'm not going to distinguish myself from, um, from other people, which
58:06: I think is right. I'm not that priest, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just one man showing other beggars random food that's on the table.
58:13: Uh, then, uh, we need to hold that principle. So when I stand on a Sunday morning with a, with a decent pair of shoes on, a pair of, of, of, of, of, of clean jeans, you know what
58:22: I mean, by dressed jeans, not just ragged. I've shaved, my hair is cut.
58:28: I'm still the best dressed person in the room. I'm still the best dressed person.
58:35: Now, if you want to get your reform principle right, of what that means, then by all means, uh, go for it.
58:41: Um, so, so it's actually, you've got to work on what your theological principle is now. However, having said that, there is a bit of a mood here to question the game of wearing a commas during, during, um, during the day in general, in order that people can recognize who
58:56: I am. Not just me being the local Anglican minister, nobody actually knows who I am. And so on occasion, when
59:01: I do wear a dog collar and I'll wear a dog collar, for example, to go to the court, uh, when I'm representing people at court, uh, advocating on their behalf or when
59:09: I go to a hospital, I always put a dog collar on. It's amazing how many emergency rooms will just open up, um, to a, to a man in a dog collar.
59:17: Uh, maybe you friends can try that one time. Just find an old yogurt carton, uh, clean it out, uh, rip it into your, um, into your, into your normal, uh, collar, uh, and see how many
59:26: ER departments, uh, don't blame me. Don't tell me what to do. Um, uh, at our local remembrance day services,
59:35: I'll obviously put my, put my dog collar on. Um, uh, for the odd student who I've robed up, put a
59:40: Catholic on the surface on, uh, but generally I'm pretty low church. Uh, but I am rather sympathetic to the idea of wearing a dog collar more often during the week so that people actually know who
59:49: I am, so that I can walk around my, my two local province and everyone instinctively goes, oh yeah, that's, that's, that's the, that's the minister, that's the priest if that's what they want to call me, you know, whatever they want to call me, if I can tell them the gospel.
01:00:00: Uh, so I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm kind of open. I'm kind of open to that. In other circumstances, you've got to work out what you're going to do.
01:00:07: Uh, so for example, if I was where I was previously, which was a church in a very much more affluent area of Sydney, uh, right on the harbor with a large segment of people whose, um, original country of origin was, was the
01:00:21: United Kingdom and some older people as well, it's quite possible in a place like that, that you might wear robes for, for, for a formal prayer book meeting, uh, because what you're actually trying to do is, it's, it's the principle of Paul, isn't it?
01:00:34: That I, I, I become all things to all men. So, so my big question is not, it's not even, is it right or wrong to wear robes?
01:00:41: My question is, what at this moment is the best means for me to commend the gospel of the
01:00:46: Lord Jesus Christ? And I'm pretty convinced it's never going to be to put on a flat outfit, but, um, there are times when
01:00:54: I might want a robe. And the robes themselves, of course, initially were just normal, normal robes, but the cassock, that black, uh, cassock was really just a robe that, uh, often that a man would wear to, um, to ride his horse.
01:01:06: You've got to imagine a minister riding from town to town, um, and doing his preaching. Uh, he'd have a robe that he'd put on, uh, to cover him as he's riding his horse.
01:01:15: And that's like many Catholics, uh, split at the waist. Uh, very interesting with that. So split at the waist so that you can, you can ride your horse and you can go right off your horse an hour from one time to another.
01:01:25: Get off your horse, you'd be all hot and sweaty. You'd take your surplus, you'd get the white shirt, over shirt out of your, out of your bag.
01:01:32: You'd whack it on over your, over your cassock so you look presentable. Uh, and then away you go. And all of a sudden this very practical, um, uh, robe, these very practical robes have, have become some holy religious symbolism, uh, that perhaps they were never intended to be.
01:01:48: Um, so others will differ on that, but, um, if that's the case, then really my job is to work out what's the best thing to wear in each situation, uh, and, and go according.
01:01:57: Well, the most important question on that issue of all is does James White wear a bow tie when he's speaking in your church?
01:02:04: Well, James and I, James and I have, have almost come to blows on this. Uh, he and I haven't.
01:02:11: He and I have, well, we've never, we've never, look, I'm English, so some things I'll mention and some things will go unspoken.
01:02:16: I don't think we've ever quite established it, but it is my implicit understanding that James is allowed to enter this country again with a limited number of bow ties, but Australian border immigration are warned about his coojies.
01:02:35: And, and, and if one of those things ever gets through the border again, I will be calling the federal police. Um, he, um, he, uh, he came and preached in the church
01:02:46: I was at previously, uh, when he came up here a while ago, and, uh, he was there and wearing his bow tie.
01:02:52: Actually, I think he took it off, because he actually, like, he was vastly overdressed. And I've said to him many, many times, mate, you know, it's a pretty bow tie.
01:03:00: Uh, and because I'm pretty, because I've given him a hard time. I'm pretty bow tie, but he's not going to need it.
01:03:06: And he's like, no, no, no, I'm going to wear my bow tie. I said, no, no, no, brother, you're not going to need it. He spent the day complaining about how portions of the
01:03:13: Donald's weren't big enough and all this kind of stuff. And, and, you know, uh, no, I love him.
01:03:18: I love him dearly. Uh, then finally he took his bow tie off, but he still wore his, his, his waistcoat, his, his, his, um, some things he couldn't, couldn't take away.
01:03:27: So, yeah, we just, we just don't do it. Um, we just don't do it. And really here in Sydney, Australia is an incredibly relaxed anti -authoritarian culture.
01:03:36: So, so unless you really should dress up, people don't. And, and what do you want to do as a minister?
01:03:42: I think what the silliest one thing you don't want to do is present yourself as somehow very different and above everybody else.
01:03:48: Uh, people, uh, people from more Roman Catholic backgrounds, they do complain about that stuff. Now they do say that often the clergy appear loose and separate and, and dress has something to do with it.
01:03:58: Uh, and so we've got to think very hard about what that means. So there's something about being recognized, but there's also something about being a presentable self -assessment.
01:04:07: And, and I don't think that's something you can come down dogmatically on, but you do have to work out what your principles are that you're going to decide to think about.
01:04:15: We have to go to another station break. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, please email it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:04:23: C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please include your first name, at least the city and state where you live and the country where you live.
01:04:33: If you live outside of the USA, I'm still hoping to hear from some of our Sydney, Australian listeners, uh, but perhaps they're waiting to hear this later on a recording.
01:04:43: But, uh, if you're listening live, please shoot us an email. We'd love to hear from you. chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:04:51: Don't go away. We're going to be right back with David Old and the state and future of the Anglican and Episcopal Church, and also an assessment on Primates 2016.
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01:06:30: That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.
01:06:47: This is Chris Orange, and if you just tuned us in for the last hour we have had on the air with us,
01:06:54: David Old, who is the rector of the
01:06:59: Glen Quarry Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia. We have been talking about the state and future of the
01:07:07: Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church, and we're going to be also now addressing the
01:07:13: Primates 2016 meetings in London that had a lot of bearing on the subject that we're talking about.
01:07:23: And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:07:30: And before I go into Primates 2016, David, why do you think that there is such a saturation of sound, orthodox, low -church,
01:07:46: Calvinistic Anglicanism in Sydney, Australia? Ah, great question.
01:07:52: And the answer is that when the first fleet came out, an Evangelical chaplain went with them.
01:07:59: So Captain James Cook famously, of course, discovered, at least is the way the British will have it, discovered, because it's not real until the
01:08:07: British find it, discovered the east coast of Australia on one of his global voyages, and then went back, his fleet went back and reported the news.
01:08:17: And Britain decided that that would be a great place to establish a prison colony.
01:08:22: That would be the best way to colonize somewhere so far away. Up until that point, British prisoners had been sent to what became the
01:08:30: United States. But that was already getting a bit full, and perhaps not even as brutal a punishment enough as somewhere far, far away could be.
01:08:40: So on the first fleet, as it's known, over 200 years ago now, the
01:08:47: British government sent basically a bunch of soldiers and a whole lot of convicted felons.
01:08:54: And Evangelicals, some of them from the same Evangelical strand where men like Wilberforce and Newton came from, said to the government, well, if you're going to be a chaplain, you're going to send a minister along.
01:09:06: And the response really was, no, they're all criminals, they don't need a priest. To which the
01:09:12: Evangelicals went, uh -huh, maybe that's why they do. And so they themselves raised the money and paid for the birth of a man called
01:09:23: Johnson who came out on the first fleet. And they landed, and Johnson set about establishing a
01:09:30: Christian ministry, an Evangelical, because like I said before, no one else will tell you. You have got to be convinced of the gospel, don't you, to get on a boat with a whole bunch of convicts, to go to the other side of the world, and I know you will never come back, just so you can preach the gospel to them so that nobody else will.
01:09:49: Because nobody else will. And so he went and he established an Evangelical ministry there, and for a while it was very, very hard going.
01:09:59: And as the colony got established, often the governor was in opposition to the chaplain, for the governor wanted the chaplain to do his job in preaching morality in an immoral place.
01:10:11: And of course the Evangelicals went, no, no, we're not primarily moralists, we're gospel men.
01:10:17: We want to preach the answer to immorality is the grace of God and forgiveness and regeneration, not, you know, try harder, be good.
01:10:26: That's the anti -gospel, isn't it? So you have this strong strand of Evangelical preaching at the start.
01:10:33: So that's why it got established. Why is it being sustained, particularly in the Anglicanism?
01:10:39: Well, that's really, I think, my analysis of it as an outsider, it's a product of two things. It's a product of geography, and it's a product of our constitutional setup within the
01:10:50: Church. So first of all, geographically, Australian cities are far away from each other.
01:10:55: Each state really has only one major city. So if you can imagine a landmass, it's about the same size as the continental
01:11:03: United States, but with only one, two, three, three and a half major cities on an equal seaboard, and then one halfway across the southern seaboard, and then one on the southwest, and then a kind of a smaller one up north in the middle somewhere.
01:11:20: They'd be a major conurbation in Australia.
01:11:26: Same landmasses as the United States of America, less than 10 % of the population. And so people are very distant one from another, which means you don't get the bleed in between groups so much that you would do in somewhere like the
01:11:40: United States, or back home in England where the diocese would bleed one into another, which means that each geographical location can kind of take on its own flavor and be somewhat protected.
01:11:51: Then also, because of the way the Anglican Church of Australia is structured, we're fairly autonomous in our diocese.
01:11:58: It's very difficult for the General Synod, when we come together every three or four or five years, it's very difficult for the
01:12:04: General Synod to impose anything upon the diocese directly, which means that if the diocese has a particular theological flavor, it can pretty well preserve that.
01:12:13: And so one of the things that happens is that in Sydney, Evangelicalism has been preserved.
01:12:19: Now, it's not always been the way that it is. We have notations with High Church Worship and the rest of it, but generally the history is of a preservation of Evangelicalism within Sydney Anglican Church.
01:12:31: That's kind of the way we are today. And we prize theological education. So it's often said that I hear around the traps that the most important job in the diocese is not
01:12:43: Archbishop of Sydney, it's Principal of Moore Theological College. And that actually,
01:12:49: I think that bears out, if you see where the Episcopal Church and the Church of England have gone apart, it's actually the seedbed is always in theological colleges.
01:12:58: So our lesson, having watched it evolve in other places, to anybody, in any denomination, anywhere else, is get your theological colleges sorted out.
01:13:08: One of the battles going on in the community at the moment, in Africa and elsewhere, is over theological education.
01:13:15: And the good guys, the conservatives, are working very hard to make sure we're supporting good theological education because the Americans have pumped money into seminaries in Africa.
01:13:23: And sadly, we've seen the liberalizing of clergy as a result of that. And Moore Theological Seminary, or college, is not to be confused with an attachment to the
01:13:39: Catholic martyr Thomas Moore, correct? Thomas Moore, no. Rather, Moore College was founded by a man called
01:13:47: Moore, who was a settler here in—actually, he wasn't one of the original settlers, but he was a man here in Sydney who, in his legacy when he died, left funds to establish a college for the educational community.
01:14:02: And it's grown from that legacy. All right. Well, we had, as was one of the reasons that we are conducting this interview, recently in London, a meeting called
01:14:17: Primates 2016. What was the reason for that gathering?
01:14:24: And tell us what happened, to the best of your ability, as a summary of what occurred there.
01:14:30: Sure. So a little bit of background. In the Anglican Union, we're an organic organization.
01:14:36: We kind of belong together, but no one's really quite worked out how. We have what we call four instruments of unity, four things that hold us together.
01:14:44: One of them is the Archbishop of Canterbury. We have all, in some way, a relationship towards him.
01:14:50: I'm actually an expression of the old British Empire and the relationships that existed there. So we have these bonds of affection, all that go through him.
01:14:58: The second instrument of unity that we have is what's called the Land of Conference. Every ten years or so, the Archbishop of Canterbury will invite every bishop in the
01:15:06: Anglican Communion, all around the world, to come together for a conference. And the last one was in 2008.
01:15:13: And then, also, we have what's called the Anglican Consultative Council, which kind of acts like a glorified church parliament.
01:15:18: A whole bunch of people from each province get together and discuss things, and issue proclamations. And it's kind of the one that no one pays any attention to, but it's there, and it costs a lot of money.
01:15:27: And then, finally, we have the primates gathering together. The primates are the principal lead bishops in each province.
01:15:35: We've got about 40 provinces around the world. And the primates get together. And again, they're brought together by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
01:15:40: Now, in 2003, the Episcopal Church, as we said, consecrated an openly gay man in an active homosexual relationship, and had been liberalizing a whole bunch of other stuff.
01:15:53: And we're talking about same -sex blessings and all that kind of stuff. And the primates started to get together slightly more urgently.
01:16:00: In 2003, just prior to Gene Robinson's consecration, they got together and they issued a statement saying, if it happens, this will be really bad.
01:16:08: It will cause a tear in the fabric of the communion, is the way they expressed it. And the presiding bishop of the
01:16:14: Episcopal Church himself, Frank Griswold, he signed that statement. Then he got on a plane, flew back to America, and promptly consecrated
01:16:21: Gene Robinson himself. So that tells you about integrity right there. He said, yeah, this will cause a tear in the fabric of the communion.
01:16:27: I'm going to go and do it anyway. And the Episcopal Church since then, and the Anglican Church of Canada, have pursued that line zealously.
01:16:35: They've consecrated more people who are alive in open homosexual relationships. And they've moved towards same -sex blessings and same -sex marriages to the point where at the last general convention, the
01:16:48: Episcopal Church actually legislated for same -sex marriage. So at that point, they changed their doctrine of marriage.
01:16:54: Now, we could say, why didn't this get sorted out a long time ago? And they actually did,
01:17:00: Chris. And in 2007, they met in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and they set out a very clear disciplinary process of what needed to happen.
01:17:10: And they basically said, look, unless we stop stocks right now, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, if they choose to go that way, they can't join it anymore.
01:17:18: And the Archbishop of Canterbury, who at the time was a man called Rowan Williams, who was a liberal theologian, very wooly, big, big, big beard, that kind of guy.
01:17:28: He simply didn't enact what the primates had asked him to enact, and called another primate meeting after a while, but at which point, all the primates said, we're not going.
01:17:42: We refuse to meet anymore with these people if nothing will be done. Rowan Williams also called the
01:17:48: Lamb of God Conference in 2008, and invited all the bishops. And a large number, a huge number of bishops, hundreds of them, over a thousand bishops were invited, and hundreds of them said, we're not going.
01:18:00: It's not just Gene Robinson, but the people who consecrated this. If they're going to go, we won't be there.
01:18:07: And instead, I mean, at the time, it's not an alternative, but look, you know, let's not be naive about what's going on.
01:18:12: Instead, we formed an organization called the Global Anglican Future Conference, and met together in 2008 in Jerusalem, and issued the
01:18:22: Jerusalem Declaration and started this movement called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. And so that's one of the major blocks of the
01:18:27: Anglican Communion, our conservative under the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. We also speak about the Global South, which is another grouping, some of which is in parallel with the
01:18:38: Gafcon movement of primates from dioceses and provinces from the Global South, like Africa and Southeast Asia and East Asia and South Asia and so forth, being together.
01:18:49: And they've basically gone, look, we've had enough. Now, we've now got a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who is an
01:18:56: Evangelical, although he's pro -Women's Bishop, and he's trying to do his best. And there's a lot of criticism of him from Evangelicals that he's not held to line.
01:19:05: He's a big man on reconciliation, despite whether he understands what reconciliation really is, but he needs repentance first.
01:19:12: We don't know, but he's well respected for trying to get people together. And he, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury two or three years ago, he made a point of going and personally visiting every primate around the world, taking his time to rebuild relationships.
01:19:25: Once he finally visited them all, he said, look, there's clearly stuff we need to sort out. I'm going to call another meeting.
01:19:31: I'm going to call a gathering, and we're going to talk about whatever you want us to talk about. Previously, the
01:19:37: Anglican Communion Office had kind of just controlled the situation. He said, we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. And surprise, surprise, most of them went, well, we want to talk about what the
01:19:45: Episcopal Church has done. And so they went, okay, let's talk about it. But what he also did is he invited the
01:19:52: Presiding Bishop of the ACNA, the Anglican Church of North America, who are not official Anglicans in the sense that Canterbury recognizes them as official
01:20:00: Anglicans, but they are official Anglicans in the sense that the rest of us go, well, they're legit. Anyway, he got invited along, a man called
01:20:07: Foley Beach, Archbishop of the ACNA. He got invited along to the meeting as well. And they all got together in Canterbury last week and talked and talked and talked.
01:20:18: And we finally got this communique that basically says to the Episcopal Church, because you changed your doctrine of marriage and because you did it in a way, really, that said, scuff you to the rest of the communion, what we want you to do is once...
01:20:35: Basically, they put them on a time -out test at the beginning. They said, you can't take any active part in the communion thing for three years.
01:20:43: You can't vote on things. You can't represent us on body. And we're going to do that for three years.
01:20:48: So the timing of three years is very deliberate. The three years will include the next general convention of the
01:20:57: Episcopal Church. So if the Episcopal Church wants to actually demonstrate that they value the relationship in the communion more than they value their own agenda, then they've got one chance, all together in their general convention, to pull it back.
01:21:13: And other provinces who are thinking about same -sex marriage themselves, Canada, New Zealand, possibly even
01:21:19: England, we might get that far, they're now on notice, effectively. This isn't good.
01:21:25: So we've kind of almost got this time -out set moment where it's time to really think it through, think about what you want, who you want to be with, and then the climate's more than likely going to meet again and then decide what to do.
01:21:40: There's every likelihood that the Episcopal Church will not move back, they will not retreat.
01:21:46: In fact, if you see what many of the bishops are saying in response, if you see what their presiding bishop, Michael Currie, is saying in response, you actually realise they have no intention of walking back on where they've gone.
01:21:55: They see inclusion of gays and others as a gospel issue. That's how they understand it. They're kind of radical that way.
01:22:02: And so they're not going to go back in integrity from what they think they should be doing. And so when the climate meets again in three years' time, we'll have a general convention of the
01:22:12: Episcopal Church that's taking a step forward, I would imagine, even more on same -sex marriage and that we'll have some tough decisions.
01:22:18: The key question that you've got to ask then is, what will the archbishop possibly do?
01:22:24: So when he calls the Lambeth Conference in 2020, which he said he's going to call, will he, given that the
01:22:30: Episcopal Church probably won't go back and others will carry on, will he therefore then say, well, you can't come to Lambeth?
01:22:36: And that's probably the moment where we have the split that's already occurred crystallized. But that's speculation now.
01:22:43: We don't know what will happen in the future. And so in your assessment, did you walk away from that more dismayed and pessimistic or more invigorated and optimistic about the state and future of the
01:23:00: Anglican Church? A bit mixed, Chris. So I and a number of people who are quite conservative have questioned whether our primates should be going anyway.
01:23:11: So the biblical mandate is very clear. You don't meet and you don't legitimize false teachers, which is what some of these people are.
01:23:18: And yet they went. People who have a great deal of respect for them went. And what actually happened was, 20 of the primates in the first primates meeting and a whole bunch of guys in the developing world had not really got their head around quite what was going on in the rest of the community.
01:23:36: And so actually a lot of the Gafcon primates decided to stay in order, although they weren't getting the results they wanted on the ground, but they stayed in order to build better relationships with those other primates and to make sure they understood properly what was at stake and what had been going on.
01:23:54: Like in our Western world, where everything's instant and we have the internet and everything, that's instant darkness and these guys would have come and not quite understood.
01:23:59: But that's the reality. You know, the primate of, I don't know, for example, the Congo, he's got bigger issues directly in front of him.
01:24:07: He's got countries torn apart by war. So we can excuse him for not quite having his head around what the surgical novel theory of the
01:24:14: Episcopal Church has done. The beauty of what happened this week was that a whole bunch of conservative and moderate primates who were kind of on the fringe of the
01:24:25: Gafcon movement have now come much more squarely into the center. So am
01:24:30: I disappointed with what ends up being the sanctions on the Episcopal Church? Yeah, I don't think they're anywhere near strong enough.
01:24:36: I think it's quite clear what needs to happen and they should have been prompted a while ago. But in terms of the trajectory of the relationship,
01:24:46: I'm really pleased with that. So I'm coming round to what's happened there more and more over the days as I reflect upon it.
01:24:54: But the trajectory is of a strengthening conservative position across the communion of key players who previously stood outside the
01:25:02: Gafcon movement, now giving every indication that they will join and are more amenable to it, of vastly improved relationships in the developing world amongst these orthodox conservative
01:25:16: Anglicans. And I think that can only bode well for the future. What pleases me as well is that it puts on the record quite clearly for all the liberalizers, even here in Australia and elsewhere, that if they want to pursue this agenda of same -sex marriage and the rest of it, then they'll pursue it, they're making a deliberate choice to pursue it against the vast majority of the primates of the
01:25:40: Anglican communion and therefore the Christians it may represent. 25 of the 35 or so primates in the room voted for the sanctions when they were finally applied.
01:25:50: Five or six abstained, for whatever reason, Christians abstained, and only three primates actually voted against it.
01:25:58: And it's pretty clear who the primates were there, they're some of the most liberal ones in the room. And so you've got this vast, overwhelming majority in the communion actually going, enough is enough.
01:26:06: And they were finally allowed to debate the issues, rather than being stymied by the process. It came up very clearly on one side.
01:26:14: It's not perfect, it's not everything that we would want, but it's certainly a move in the right direction. Many things have been left unaddressed, but it's a start.
01:26:23: So I'm not totally happy, but it's growing on the increase. And where would you say, if you know this statistically, the greatest concentration of Bible -believing, biblical inerrancy advocates, and even low church
01:26:44: Calvinists, where would that be in the world, the greatest concentration of Anglicans who are basically in kindred spirits with you, like -minded brothers of like precious faith?
01:27:01: The greatest concentration are in two places, in a broad, but mainly in a broad belt that goes from East Africa, so Kenya, sweeping through Rwanda, Uganda, down towards Nigeria.
01:27:15: That belt across the middle of Africa, that is the heart of, numerically, the heart of biblical
01:27:22: Anglicanism now. They're all products of British mission going out two or three centuries ago.
01:27:28: And now they're saying to the Anglican Union, why are you abandoning the very gospel truth that you brought to us this day, sir?
01:27:35: And they are themselves sending missionaries back to England, and they're standing with us, those of us
01:27:41: Westerners who are still trying to be faithful. But that's where the broad, that's where the broad establishment are, because there's a good number of people in Southeast Asia, there's some in South America, but that central chunk of Africa, given the numeracy of the actual continent and the number of people who are actively
01:28:01: Anglican there, that's where the bulk is. So at the GAFCOM conference in Nairobi that I went to a couple of years ago, it was mainly
01:28:10: Africans around me. It was Ugandans and Kenyans and Nigerians, and it was glorious, Chris.
01:28:15: It was absolutely fantastic. It was, I speak as a bishop who'd been at the previous Lambeth conference, and even bishops' conferences in their own provinces in the
01:28:27: West. And they were saying, this is totally different, because even Lambeth was just, it was hard, it was dry.
01:28:35: I couldn't look across the room and know the person I was talking to actually believed the same things about Jesus that I knew, but this was different.
01:28:42: We were all clearly on the same page, and yes, we had our differences. And Jack Allaker was, you know, with his high churchmanship was in one corner and there, but we actually all stood together.
01:28:53: We all praised the Lord Jesus Christ, and we read his word together, and we committed ourselves to the evangelization of the world and supporting one another.
01:29:00: And it was tremendous, Chris. And that's the Anglican community. So again, to my American friends who are listening, you've got to look up and beyond.
01:29:09: The Anglican church in North America has been saved by the Africans. The Nigerians and the Rwandans and others, they established ministries.
01:29:17: They sent bishops and consecrated bishops to stand in the place of those who were projected
01:29:24: Anglican Christians in North America. They got the whole thing up and running. And then the
01:29:31: Anglican church has grown from that. It's become an adult in its own right. But as it was growing up, it's brief adolescence.
01:29:37: It is sponsored and nurtured by the African church, which is a wonderful thing, isn't it? I mean, that's a great comeback.
01:29:44: A nation that once used to enslave Africans now has a gospel. And of course, it was the Episcopalians, who were involved in the slave trade.
01:29:52: Don't forget that. Africa has given back with much grace to the
01:29:58: Anglicanism in North America. And would these would be predominantly in Africa, not the
01:30:06: Oxford movement, Tractarians, but the... No, there's certainly some influence.
01:30:14: So, for example, classically at the Nigerian, at the Gatcon conference, one of the days when
01:30:20: Nigerians were responsible for militancy. And so we sang Faith of Our Fathers at the end of the communion service, which was, of course, as a classical
01:30:28: Tractarian hymn. So the influences are there, they're in the churchmanship.
01:30:34: But like I said before, Chris, sit down with them in a seminar room, open up your Bible, talk about Jesus. And I tell you what, you will forgive a lot of wacky churchmanship for a man that just, just bleeds the blood of the
01:30:48: Lord Jesus Christ as his only means of justification. I tell you what, they could wear lace as much as they want.
01:30:56: That's what I'd like to see. You know what I mean? And then it's just a point of political history, isn't it?
01:31:04: Someday you'll come around and agree with me on these things. But the basics are in place,
01:31:09: Chris. And that allows us, I think, to have a certain amount of latitude. It doesn't mean we avoid those discussions.
01:31:15: We have them in a generous spirit and with clarity.
01:31:21: And we'll seek to influence them. Either way, do what they think is best. But I tell you what, brother, when people preach
01:31:28: Christ and plead his death and resurrection on their behalf as their salvation from the eternal wrath and judgment of God that they justly deserve,
01:31:38: I don't know how many complaints you want to raise, especially when they are clinging. They are clinging some of them to a little bit of dead weight, a little bit of flops and injections in a sea of liberalism.
01:31:51: I just think it's churlish, isn't it, to complain about the clothes they're wearing as they hang on to good life for a very long time.
01:31:57: Well, we're going to be going to our final break right now. And if you have a question for David Old, now is the time to write it because we've got less than a half hour left.
01:32:08: Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com
01:32:18: Please give us your first name, at least city and state of residence and country of residence if you live outside the
01:32:24: USA. We'll be right back with David Old of the Glen Quarry Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia, discussing the state and future of Anglicanism and also his assessment of the
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01:36:14: This is Chris Arnes, and if you've just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes, we have been talking with David Old of the
01:36:21: Glen Quarry Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia. And he has been discussing the state and future of Anglicanism and also his assessments of Primates 2016, a major gathering of Anglicans worldwide in London.
01:36:37: And this just recently took place. If you have any questions of your own, we're running out of time, so please quickly email them to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:36:48: chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Now, what is your opinion, David, of a number of the denominations that have formed?
01:36:58: I don't know how many of them exist in Australia or the UK or other places, but I know that in the
01:37:06: United States, there are some groups that identify themselves as Anglican that are very conservative and some of which are very
01:37:16: Calvinistic and low church, but they have no part officially. They're not officially connected to the greater
01:37:24: Anglican communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, etc. What is your assessment of groups like that who identify themselves as Anglican?
01:37:33: Yeah, well, a number of them formed over the past decade and even centuries as they watched various liberalizing tendencies and decided they had to come out from the
01:37:44: Anglican church or the Episcopal church as it was there. So in one sense, there's a great deal of integrity there, isn't there?
01:37:50: What's been interesting in North America is that there's been a movement of some of those denominations, if you like.
01:37:57: Now, some of them are not huge. We're talking about a couple of bishops, 20 parishes, maybe.
01:38:03: Some are larger than that. There's been a movement of some of those back into some form of affiliation with the ACNA. So one of the movements that we've seen is that movement going back.
01:38:13: Now, accompanied with that, there's been some concern that there are some
01:38:19: Baptisticism beliefs. I mean, it ranged from people who decided that the church wasn't
01:38:25: Romish enough for those who thought it was too Roman or too liberal. And so you get a wide variety.
01:38:31: But there has been some movement back. I think my general word would be that you've got to be able to go back with integrity.
01:38:39: You've got to be able to sign up to the core documents. You've got to be able to do that.
01:38:46: And if we do want to, then Anglicanism has always been something that embraces others.
01:38:51: It's always been a slightly broader church than other denominations. Now, I don't like the broad church argument when it's used to include any kind of nonsense.
01:39:00: But we've always been, we have always been slightly generous. Edison's room and Elizabeth's via media.
01:39:06: I've heard, don't ask the first time. I don't want to open up she said her window into men's souls. Ever since that, we've been slightly broader than perhaps we should do.
01:39:14: But there's been a generosity about that there. So if they want to come home to mother, as I might put it, then
01:39:20: I say embrace them as long as they're prepared to all good integrity to sign up to the foundation documents.
01:39:27: The big particular movement home, if you like, was what was called the Anglican Mission in America.
01:39:34: In the 1990s, I think I might say, the then Bishop of Singapore and the
01:39:40: Bishop of Rwanda consecrated two men as bishops to go into America to form an alternate
01:39:48: Anglican movement, which was long before the ACMA was there. They were so concerned, even at the time of what was going on with the
01:39:55: Catholic Church, they started off. The ANIA became known, grew and grew and grew and grew.
01:40:03: And over the last two or three years, it's been a difficult transition back into the
01:40:08: ACMA. There's been a couple of pickups along the way with some bent relationships, but even they have managed the transition back in.
01:40:20: Most of them, they actually repented a lot of them of the way that they responded to the house of the Bishop of Rwanda over a few things.
01:40:26: And those relationships seem to be on the mend and being mended. So there is this movement back towards,
01:40:34: I say more power to them. You've got to remember these are people, these are denominations who are formed in hardship, in people of good conscience, because we can no longer stay.
01:40:44: Because the gospel, you understand it, is not in Christ. And so gathering them all up again, it's almost like gathering the exiles back into Jerusalem.
01:40:51: I don't want to overdo it, because, you know, it's the simplest thing that I can do normally. But, you know, there is a movement back.
01:40:57: And what it does mean is you've got a bit of a smorgasbord of slaves all within the ACNH today, which some may say is a strength and others may say is an inherent weakness.
01:41:06: I'll leave the listeners aside. We have a listener from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Richard Hargrave, who is the
01:41:15: Senior Warden of the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd. And he writes, thank you for your valuable time and explanation of such a very complicated subject matter on the
01:41:27: Iron Sharpens Iron broadcast. Why does the traditional and classical
01:41:32: Anglican faith have to be discussed in terms of Calvinism or Roman Catholicism?
01:41:39: The Anglican faith in theological terms is distinctly different from Calvinism or Roman Catholicism and much more closer to true biblical theology.
01:41:50: And then this is a very lengthy letter, so perhaps I could email it to you later, but I'll just give you one more part of it that you could respond to.
01:41:57: Richard Hooker, gives a magnificent explanation of the correct position of the
01:42:03: Anglican Church in relation to the Roman Catholic Church and the Calvinists.
01:42:09: Its correct position is exactly between both churches. The Anglican Church occupies the middle ground between both churches and is not aligned with the
01:42:22: Calvinists nor with the Roman Catholic Church. Richard Hooker made this very clear in his work.
01:42:29: Now, obviously, he's talking about the via media here. Now, if you could respond to Senior Warden Richard Hargraves comments and questions.
01:42:40: Well, thank you, Richard, and more power to your bow for turning his back for biblical truth in America.
01:42:48: All over North America, there are guys like Richard who have overseen the movement of their churches. Quite possibly,
01:42:54: Richard's church is one of those from the Episcopal Church and while I'm going to disagree slightly with some of his reading of history, please don't read any disrespect from myself,
01:43:04: Richard. I have profound respect for all of you who have worked so hard to maintain integrity through these last few decades.
01:43:13: Yes, Hooker's position is that via media and he's quite right in saying that we're not wholly
01:43:20: Calvinist. However, when you go back to the original establishment of the Church of England under Edward's reign and all the hard work done there to set it in place and the
01:43:30: Elizabethan settlement, the act of uniformity under Elizabeth is essentially a re -establishment of that under Edward.
01:43:38: You will find that the predominant influence upon the
01:43:43: Anglican reformers, so theologically, it's originally Luther and people are reading Luther's work, but then they were looking to the
01:43:50: French continental reformers. They're looking to, under Swiss, they were looking to Calvin and to Luther to understand how to do things.
01:44:00: And in fact, the 1552, on which the 1552 is derived, shows many influences of Calvin and Luther.
01:44:08: We've got tremendous letters for both of them in place. It's got some new patterns. When you read the third known articles,
01:44:14: I think as a Calvinist, which is what I am, I read the third known articles and don't flinch at all.
01:44:21: And I read my 1562 Book of Common Prayer and its view on the sacrament, and I don't flinch at all.
01:44:29: And I think sometimes Hooker gets used to soften out what is a clear, clearly not just Protestant, but reformed view in the ancient church.
01:44:42: To the extent that I don't think Hooker himself would have gone with it. I'm going to say one more thing as well,
01:44:47: Chris. We often speak of ourselves as reformed Catholics and some people say that to mean that we're kind of like the
01:44:54: Catholics, but not quite. But the notion of being a reformed Catholic was originally set up by a man called
01:45:00: John Jewell, who was a bishop under Queen Elizabeth I. And he wrote what is famously called
01:45:06: An Apology for the Church of England. And John Jewell's argument that we were reformed Catholics is that we were
01:45:12: Catholic in the right sense, that is, from the Greek, kathaholos, according to the whole. And when you read
01:45:17: John Jewell going through what Catholicism is for him, that is to say what the whole of the church believes, you actually realize it's a very positive, very reformed religion.
01:45:28: It is an extraordinary thing. And so those words have been understood in different ways as centuries have passed.
01:45:40: But I think I said it over via media. We're not staunch Aragonite Calvinists.
01:45:46: We have an episcopal system of governance. We understand our leadership, the threefold ministry, deacons, priests, presidents, and bishops.
01:45:55: And so we don't have to be exclusive Calvinists. Yet at the same time, the Church of England, its foundational documents, which most of the
01:46:04: Anglican Church today still hold in their doctrine, they are fairly Calvinistic. I mean, you'd be hard -pressed otherwise to do that.
01:46:12: So that's my little pushback to my good friend in Oklahoma. And yet at the same time, more power to his doctrine.
01:46:19: He and men and women like him have super ground on the gospel. And I'm sure if I possibly one day we can sit down over a good meal and chat these things through.
01:46:28: And that will remain in his strong fellowship again. And of course, since you and I are
01:46:34: Calvinists, we would believe that is the true biblical faith. Oh, yeah.
01:46:40: But having said that, Chris, look, I'll have table time with the Pope back here. So that's the extent that I will go.
01:46:50: So I'm talking to you for more than an hour. Now, there are many listeners to Iron Sharpens Iron, I'm sure, especially those who are among my more separatist, fundamentalist friends and brothers who would say, why are you even bothering?
01:47:10: If you have apostates in leadership in this denomination, why don't you just leave the denomination and join or form something that is more in accord to your own biblical convictions?
01:47:27: All right, well, it looks like David Old has been disconnected. Very important question.
01:47:34: Hopefully, David will call back before the program is over.
01:47:41: And in fact, what I'm going to do right now, while David may be scrambling around to plug in his cell phone or whatever he is doing right now, hopefully he will call us back shortly.
01:47:56: But in fact, he's calling back now. And welcome back, David Old.
01:48:02: Thank you for calling us back. I'm not sure what happened, but here we are. As I was saying before the disconnect,
01:48:09: I have many friends and brothers who are more on the separatist line of things, fundamentalist, if you will, both from Calvinist backgrounds and other backgrounds, some of them even anti -Calvinist.
01:48:25: But they would say, why are you even bothering being attached to a denomination where there are known heretics and apostates and sexual deviants in leadership, where even money is given to support these people and their views?
01:48:41: Why on earth don't you just leave there and form a new body that adheres to your own biblical convictions or join another group that would share that or those convictions or even just be an independent congregation that adheres to your biblical convictions?
01:49:03: Yeah, absolutely. And Martin Lloyd -Jones famously in the 1960s in England sparked that to be conserved in the evangelicals that he met with, famously amongst them
01:49:13: J .I. Packer and John Scott. He actually issued the call to come out from among them, famously, I think, at the
01:49:18: Keswick Convention and put that point through them back in the 1960s. My answer is on a number of fronts.
01:49:26: Number one, because we own the title deed, because this is our property.
01:49:32: I read my third man articles. I read my prayer books. I'm an Anglican. And if you have squatters in the house or a cuckoo in the nest, you don't easily give up a house.
01:49:43: If you have squatters in the house, then I think what you do is you kill the utility. And so you're right.
01:49:49: People are making decisions now about where money goes and the rest of it. But I think what you do is more widely, you do what the gap on you is doing.
01:49:59: You say, well, the Bible's really clear. We don't meet officially. We don't meet in religious practice with false teachers, which is why the gap on conference was formed by people of integrity that we cannot go to the last night of conference while these men and women are there.
01:50:17: So we will meet ourselves. And this movement has been growing and growing and growing. And so every time someone says to me, leave the communion,
01:50:24: I say, well, no, I'm not going anywhere. The Episcopal Church wants to place themselves outside the communion.
01:50:31: I'm not going anywhere. We're staying where we are. We will meet with everybody who pleads in the name of the
01:50:37: Lord Jesus Christ and upholds his word. And those gatherings are growing and growing and growing and growing. But I'm not handing over Anglicanism to a bunch of liberals.
01:50:46: I'm staying where I am. I let them do what they want. Now, the beauty, of course, is that I agree with the position that we actually don't need the
01:50:53: Archbishop of Canterbury. I don't need to be seen officially to be Anglican. And I'm a Christian man first before I'm an
01:50:59: Anglican. But Anglicanism to me is something I'm affectionate about. And I'm an Anglican by conviction.
01:51:05: I'm sure many of your listeners whatever denomination they are, by conviction. And it's not just a theological issue.
01:51:11: It's home as well. I think that's quite important where we grew up. And it's a heritage and a legacy in Anglicanism worth defending,
01:51:19: I think, Chris. So we're going to stick around. And actually, we're in the majority. And we're finally getting a grip again on the institutions, on the way it works.
01:51:29: And the thing is finally turning around. And I actually want to conspire for 10 years' time. Globally, you'll have the
01:51:36: Episcopal Church out on a fringe somewhere. And in the meantime, we will do all the things that my friend asked us to do.
01:51:43: We will not meet with false teachers. We will not recognize them. We will stand against them. If people ask me, am
01:51:50: I associated with them? I think I've made my viewpoint on the former presiding bishop very clear. I don't think anybody can even doubt where I stand.
01:51:57: But I'm not walking away from Anglicanism. I'm actually going to say, no, she has walked away. She's walked away for a long time ago.
01:52:04: I've had, sadly, some people here in Australia. Now, they don't like that.
01:52:09: They get terribly, terribly agitated when we say that. And what's really interesting is that those people who are, who theologically have walked away the most are the people who dress up the most as well.
01:52:21: It's very, very interesting. When you can't hold, and I think it's happening in other denominations as well, when you can't hold a theological conviction, then you fly to liturgy and practice as your mark of authenticity.
01:52:34: So, it's no mistake that if you go to a Episcopal church service and speak to one of the politicians, they do all the liturgical stuff.
01:52:44: And they make sure that they have what they call the Eucharist and so forth. Why? Because it's their mark of authenticity. Now, let them tell themselves they're authentic.
01:52:52: But you and I can't do anything about that. I have to sit a little bit loose for that. But when it comes to us, the majority of Anglican Christians, we're just going to put them to one side, see this process through, keep proclaiming the name of the
01:53:04: Lord Jesus Christ, and ask him to do his work in his church, or which Anglican religion he's a part of.
01:53:09: There's another reason as well why it's important to say it's right. It's that Anglicanism is one of the major denominations in the world.
01:53:16: You've got the Roman Catholics, you've got the Orthodox, and the Anglicans are a huge influence throughout the world.
01:53:23: It's the established church in England. It's got a place in many Western cultures. It's not something that we want to give up lightly.
01:53:30: And that doesn't mean that we compromise. It doesn't mean that we're purely pragmatic. But it actually does matter globally what the
01:53:38: Anglicans do, and which direction they go in. And so if we had all left and walked away a while ago, there would basically have been a campus meeting last week, but it may not have gone the way that we wanted it to go.
01:53:52: But we'll stay in sight for more. If, however, we get to a point where the Australian church won't date beneficially, we're in favour of faith expansion,
01:54:00: I think you'd find there would be a split here as well. We'd walk away at that point. Once we've enshrined the beneficiaries, once we've enshrined the beneficiaries.
01:54:08: But we're actually not at that point in Australia, and we're really not at that point in England yet as well. It's only in Canada and America where we've actually got to that point.
01:54:16: It's widespread. It's institutionalised. So that's where the split has occurred. For the rest of us,
01:54:23: I don't know. I don't see how any of my friends have been here for the last two hours and seen me as speaking of myself as associated with the kind of heresy that this sort of church is being propagated.
01:54:34: On the contrary, we stand against it, and firmly against it, and we've got the keys to the front door of the house, we own the title deed, and we're working on getting this quadrant out of the house.
01:54:45: And before we go, I've got to have you describe the reality
01:54:51: TV show you were a part of in Australia, and I'm wondering if that's ever going to be viewable here in the
01:54:59: States. Josh, well, I'm not sure. So I was part of a show called Living With The Enemy, which
01:55:04: I think has been an American version of cable TV, which was basically just brighter and louder in America.
01:55:11: But I was invited to take part in a 10 -day experiment where a gay couple came and lived with my family.
01:55:17: And then I went to spend five days with them, which included a wedding in New Zealand and a gay pride march and some other stuff.
01:55:25: And it was a fascinating experience. And I did my very best to try and explain my position and listen to them.
01:55:31: They sadly were far less interested in listening than just shouting, terrified, particularly one of the gentlemen involved.
01:55:38: So it was a good experience. I'd certainly do it again. I might do a few things differently. And the
01:55:44: DVD is available. I'm sure you can go to Amazon and get it. I have sent a copy to my good friend,
01:55:49: Dr. James White. And so if you on Amazon, if you search for Living With The Enemy, and you'll be looking for the one with the picture on the front cover, it's done by SVF of a company who published it in Australia.
01:56:04: The production company are Shine. And it's a picture of me in a blue shirt with two very clearly gay guys on the front.
01:56:12: Well, they're just stereotypical, breaking all the paradigms and stuff. I look, and this is a time, there were many good times part of it.
01:56:19: It's a hard, hard, hard, hard process. I've learned a great deal. But I walked away going, they actually don't have any substantive arguments for gay marriage.
01:56:29: I wasn't hearing anything new other than just let me do what I want to do. So it was good even for a person who's doing that.
01:56:37: And, you know, Chris, honestly, how else are you and I ever going to go and spend some time at a gay march parade?
01:56:43: And get a feel for what's going on and the vibe of it. Or how many gay weddings would you probably go to?
01:56:49: I mean, on principle, I probably wouldn't go to one normally. So that was interesting. I know that you were opposing their lifestyle in defense of Biblical marriage and Biblical sexuality.
01:56:59: But did you still take any heat from your fellow conservative and Bible -believing Anglicans and Christians?
01:57:06: No! No, in fact, people were very, very kind to me and very grateful, expressed great gratitude to me for the way that I've gone about it.
01:57:15: I've certainly done it perfectly. There's some things I do against my discipline. But I was determined to go and try and have a good conversation and model what it meant to disagree with someone but still try to speak from love.
01:57:27: That's difficult, of course, in a world that increasingly views love as agreement. But I've tried it nevertheless.
01:57:35: And I think you can do get the DVD. And there's also some other fascinating topics on that DVD from Australia on immigration and Islam and the silent seekers and stuff like that.
01:57:46: Really, really worth watching. A great little insight into it. But if you watch my episodes, you will get a sense of trying to explain myself, trying to reach out.
01:57:56: And it's a pretty fair representation of the 10 days. And it's incredibly difficult to shrink 10 days into one hour of speaking.
01:58:03: The only thing that wasn't great was the way they edited it, the church service that we had. But on my website, davidowells .net,
01:58:10: O -U -L -D, I got it in eventually, I put up a whole bunch of lists of articles and media interviews surrounding it.
01:58:17: You can actually hear the sermon that I preach and read the text of it and see the way that we present ourselves. So a great experience all around.
01:58:24: And I really want to encourage Christians to engage lovingly and winsomely, but clearly in all these debates that are going on, not just because we have rights, but because we love the country and the society that we live in.
01:58:35: And we want to carry that. And we want people to care about Jesus. And we love the never dying souls of men, even those who are lost.
01:58:44: Absolutely. And we have to go now, David. It's been such a delight for me to have you on this broadcast.
01:58:51: And I look forward to you coming back on Iron Sharpens Iron very soon.
01:58:56: And I hope to hear from you, especially if you're traveling through the Eastern part of the
01:59:02: United States at any point. And his website is davidold .net. That's davidold,
01:59:07: O -U -L -D .net. And David, if you could just stay on the line for a little bit after the show goes off the air,
01:59:13: I just wanted to have a little conversation with you before we depart. But I wanted everybody to remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.
01:59:25: God bless. And we look forward to hearing from you with your questions tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron.