September 22, 2020 Show with Peter Robinson on “The Fall of the Episcopal Church & the Rise of Biblically Faithful Episcopal Bodies”

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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Tuesday. On this 22nd day of September 2020 and I'm thrilled to have a first -time guest today.

His name is Peter D. Robinson and he is the presiding bishop of the

United Episcopal Church of North America. He also serves as ordinary of the missionary diocese of the

East and rector of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.

Today we are going to be discussing the fall of the Episcopal Church and the rise of biblically faithful Episcopal bodies and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Bishop Peter D.

Robinson. Hello there. It's great to have you on the program and you came by the way by the strong urging and high recommendation of a faithful listener of this program in Long Island, New York who himself is a traditional

Episcopalian or Anglican named Michael and we thank Michael for his strong recommendation of our guest today.

Before we go into the theme at hand, we typically have our first -time guests give a summary of their salvation story, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, they were raised in and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them and obviously we have a wide variety of stories by brothers and sisters in Christ because some were nurtured in the faith since infancy and they don't remember a time when they did not know and love

Jesus and then of course you have those stories that are much more of a stark contrast than much more of a black and white situation where you have somebody who was living as an open rebel, hostile to a

God and his Word who was radically transformed into a faithful follower of Christ.

But tell us your story in summary form. The summary form is really reasonably short, thankfully.

I grew up in an environment where Anglicanism was part of the furniture.

So the headmaster at school was an Anglican lay reader. It was just part of the furniture.

And I didn't take Christianity terribly seriously until I got into my teenage years.

And then the whole concept grew on me, first by an acceptance that I really couldn't accept a version of the universe that completely excluded

God. That to me seemed just totally improbable. And then increasingly

I accepted the Biblical revelation of Christ as being the

Son of God. And that's what led me from being nominally

Christian to being definitely a very active member of the church, and somebody absolutely convinced of the truth of Christianity.

And I was confirmed at 17, which kind of tells you when I got to the end of the process of finding my way into Christianity, or rather being drawn into Christianity.

But there had always been Christian people around who, although they didn't talk about their faith an awful lot, you knew it was a big part of their lives, so the influence was always there.

And I'm assuming, judging from your accent, that this was taking place in England.

Yes. Yes, I grew up at the very top end of Lincolnshire, a little town called Barton -on -Humber, which is about as far north as you can get in the province of York.

There's only one parish further north, and that's the next one over Barrow -on -Humber. And it was an area where you just could not miss the influence of the church.

I mean, about half the primary schools were run by the Church of England. The influence was always there at that time.

I don't know what it's like today. I mean, we're talking, you know, 40, 50 years ago. Now what was it that the

Lord providentially used in your life that drew you into an interest in entering into the ministry and believing that you had received a call from God to actually become a minister?

There was a canon of Ripon Cathedral, Ronnie Macfadden, who kind of took my slight interest in the ministry and fostered it.

And he himself was very different to some of the other clergy

I'd run into earlier in life in that he took the intellectual side of Christianity very seriously.

And he was somebody I could really sort of connect with on a profound level, and he fanned the flame, as it were.

But there had been others before that who had said to me, why don't you think about it?

I think you would be a good fit. So it was one of those things that, a little bit like faith itself, came slowly for me.

I do know that sort of going into college, it was something I was thinking about. And by the end of college, it was something that I definitely wanted to do because I felt

I had the call to do it. And when you...

Go ahead. I'm sorry. Sorry, you go ahead. I was just going to say, when you were finally accepted that call into the ministry, was that in the

Anglican Church in England? Was it in the Episcopal Church's main denomination here in the United States?

Where was that? Well, initially, I started going through the process in the Church of England.

And this was the early 1990s. And the rector of my parish sponsored me, put me forward.

I went to the area director of ordinance. He was fine with me, sent me on to the next level.

And at that point, I knew I was on a, as we say in England, a sticky wicket because when

I walked into the guy's office, there was a picture of his wife's ordination in Canada. At this time, the ordination of women in the

Church of England had not taken place. And there was, shall we say, a somewhat stilted conversation.

And then I started getting the polite version of the runaround because I really wasn't what they wanted.

Attached to the prayer book, theologically conservative. They didn't want that because I was not going to be part of the brave new world they were trying to create in the

Church of England. I'd be one of those chaps who was protesting it every inch of the way. And I suppose

I saw in that a little bit of what the future held for the

Church of England in that although technically it was an open matter, so far as the

Diocese of Lincoln was concerned, the question was already closed. They were going to let a few conservatives through so there could be no complaints about a stained -glass ceiling.

But on the whole, you had to conform to sort of the liberal, Anglo -Catholic leanings of the leadership of the diocese if you wanted to be selected.

So they sent me off to do things to try and turn me into a liberal. So I worked for six months in a parish in the

Diocese of Southwark, which was an interesting experience.

Certainly by the time I left the Diocese of Southwark I knew the debate about active homosexuals in the clergy was a lot closer than anybody at that time thought it was, because a good number of the clergy in that diocese were certainly of that orientation.

Whether or not they were practicing or not, I don't know, but there were certainly a few couples running around in the ministry.

So tell us about the United Episcopal Church of North America, where you are now the

Presiding Bishop. Tell us about when this denomination, if you will, was formed, the circumstances surrounding its formation, and how you got called into it.

The United Episcopal Church goes back to the mid -1970s train wreck in the

Protestant Episcopal Church. As some of your listeners may know, there was a conference in 1977 called the

St. Louis Congress of Concerned Churchmen, which was organized by the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, who were opposed to the new

Episcopal religion, the ordination of women, the new prayer book, the loosening of the standards on marriage, so on and so forth.

And the initial church that was formed out of that was the original

Anglican Church of North America Episcopal, in brackets. And that organization quickly renamed itself the

Anglican Catholic Church. And that was really a sign of tensions to come, because it was almost as though the middle -of -the -road and low -church

Episcopalians in the newly renamed ACC were not really welcome at the top level, i .e.

as bishops within the organization, and that produced a lot of tension.

Along with that, they decided their first order of priority was not to plant missions and organize dioceses, but to revise the canons.

And that threw a whole other level of stress on the organization, and eventually the original

Continuing Church, actually not quite the original Continuing Church body, because the

Anglican Orthodox Church is older. This Continuing Church body broke up into the

Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of Christ the King, and the United Episcopal Church.

And the United Episcopal Church was organized in 1981 specifically for middle -to -low -church

Episcopalians who were looking for a biblically orthodox home. And rather than spend a lot of time on Constitution and canons -type issues, we took the 1958 canons of the

Protestant Episcopal Church and made only one amendment, which was we altered the

Declaration of Conformity to include the Thirty -Nine Articles, because it was felt by Bishop Doran, who was the original bishop of the denomination, that soft -peddling the

Articles had been part of the theological decline of the Episcopal Church from the mid -19th century onwards.

Now, if you could, for our listeners, especially, who are not

Episcopalian or Anglican, who are not familiar with the Thirty -Nine Articles, if you could give us a summary of their background,

I know that they have their origins with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who

I consider to be a great hero of the faith. And I think that the

Thirty -Nine Articles really separate those who are truly

Protestant Anglicans and Episcopalians, as opposed to Anglo -Catholics, because there are things amongst the

Thirty -Nine Articles, there are teachings, that obviously no one who was a more

Tractarian or Oxford Movement Anglican or Episcopalian would be able to adhere to, because of the strong stances against some key

Roman practices and beliefs. But if you could, tell us about the Thirty -Nine Articles. The Thirty -Nine

Articles are the result of quite a long process. The initial set of Articles, the

Thirteen Articles, was drawn up in 1537, and never approved, and they were part of Henry VIII's negotiations with the

Lutherans. The culmination is the Marriage to Anne of Cleves, but that was kind of a side issue.

He was looking for alliances on the continent. And at that time, the English Reformation was orientated more towards Lutheranism than the

Reformed side of the Reformation. As the 1540s wore on,

Cranmer revised them several times, but the basic framework comes from this original

Thirteen Articles document from the late 1530s. The initial published draft of the

Thirty -Nine Articles actually had 42 Articles in it, and was published in mid -1553, in the closing days of the reign of Edward VI.

And the basic orientation of the Thirty -Nine Articles can be deduced by the fact that Martin Butzer, the major reformer in Strasbourg, had a lot of influence on Cranmer in the 1540s and the early 1550s.

Cranmer had him appointed as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1548.

And it identifies the Church of England theologically with the moderate

Reformed tradition that was evolved basically by Martin Butzer, with a little help from Philip Melanchthon when he wasn't working for Luther.

And they sort of position the Church of England in that sort of Strasbourg -Zurich -Heidelberg tradition of Reformed theology.

Now, of course, during the Reaction under Mary I, the Articles and the Prayer Book went away.

They come back again in 1562, although actually, to our calculation, that's early 1563, when they are revised slightly.

And they become the main confessional document of the Church of England, and remain so on paper to this day.

And they are one of the three major documents of the English Reformation, along with the

Book of Common Prayer and the Two Books of Homilies, which are also pretty much moderate

Reformed in their theological orientation. The Thirty -Nine

Articles were required to be subscribed to by the clergy from 1563 through to 1871 in the

Church of England. The Church of Ireland continued subscription up until the last 20 years.

So it was very much regarded as being a confessional standard in the way that, say, the

Westminster Confession was regarded as a confessional standard by the Presbyterians.

But they fell into disfavor in the 19th century, largely because both the

Anglo -Catholics and the Liberals found them too constricting.

And so you have a campaign in the mid -19th century to loosen subscription to the Thirty -Nine

Articles, if not abolish it altogether. And although in 1809 the

Episcopal Church had declared that the Thirty -Nine Articles were part of its doctrinal position, by the end of the 19th century they're soft -pedaling that.

And that's mainly due to the decline of evangelical Anglicanism in the

Episcopal Church in the 1880s and the 1890s. As the

Protestant side of the Episcopal Church goes over to the sort of liberal

Protestant theology that's coming out of Germany in that period. And...

Have we got more than you... I'm sorry? You've probably got more than you bargained for. No, I'm actually... I want you to be as thorough and detailed as possible.

We do have two hours, so that's just... Oh yeah. That's more than wonderful. In fact, if anybody listening wants to, after this program is over, they want to find out more about the primary framer of the

Thirty -Nine Articles, Thomas Cranmer, you can go to the archive of this program, www .ironsharpensironradio

.com, and click on Podcast Past Shows, and in the search engine, type in Ashley Null, or even just Null, N -U -L -L, and you will get a number of interviews pop up, the audio links for those interviews with Ashley Null, and at least two,

I believe, on the subject of Thomas Cranmer. Now, if you could tell us a little bit more about the prayer book, the

Book of Common Prayer that you just mentioned, because that may be something that's also very unfamiliar to those in our listening audience who are outside of your orbit of denominational associations.

Yeah, the prayer book that we use in the United States dates from 1928, but it is, if my memory serves me correctly, the seventh prayer book that was used in the

United States. You have two American revisions before it, three

English revisions before that, and then of course you have two draft prayer books that didn't quite make it.

So it's actually a tradition that goes back to, again, this period around 1550, when

Cranmer and the other Reform -minded bishops are laying the foundations for the Reformed Church of England.

The prayer book, I would honestly say, is dependent on three major sources.

One of the things you have to remember about mid -16th century intellectuals is they all talk to each other in Latin.

So what you have actually in the mid -16th century amongst the

Reformers is a great deal of exchange of ideas. And the main text that forms the basis of the

Book of Common Prayer, obviously the old Latin liturgy that was used in England, the dominant version of which was the

Serum use, from which familiar prayers such as Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, are derived.

Then on top of this is the influence of a simple and pious consultation which was written for Archbishop Herman von

Weed of Cologne by Bützer, who is responsible for roughly 85 % of it, and Philip Melanchthon, which was part of his effort to reform what is still the

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cologne, reform it in a Lutheran direction. Then there's also the influence of Bützer's Strasbourg liturgy, which is one of the early reformed liturgies.

And Cranmer was one of those minds that is very good at taking existing material and weaving it into a new framework.

One of the things that's said about the 1662 communion services, which is actually

Cranmer's of 1552, is that it's one of the best liturgical expressions of the doctrine of justification by faith you'll come across.

Because one of the things that was very important in England was that the

Reformation should be put into liturgical form, because you couldn't rely on the clergy to preach reformed ideas.

The whole system of appointment and tenure remained unchanged.

So the main vehicle for getting the reformed religion into the parishes was the

Book of Common Prayer and the two books of homilies that went along with it. And so what

Cranmer did was that he took large elements of the traditional liturgy and reorganized them into services which were suitable for a reformed church.

Naturally the service that gets the heaviest overhaul is the Eucharist.

So like Luther, he strips out any mention of sacrifice.

He strips out the doctrine of transubstantiation. But the basic framework of the service remains more or less in its traditional form, although there is the

Strausberg influence there, so the Ten Commandments become part of the introductory part of the service.

The traditional sequence of colex epistles and gospels, that's the prayer of the day and the two major bible readings, remained unchanged from medieval times in 90 % of cases.

At the end of the Liturgy of the Word you have the Creed, this is followed by the Sermon, and then after that it looks very much like the reformed liturgies of places like Strausberg and Heidelberg in that you have the prayer for the church, you have a general confession, you have the prayer over the bread and the wine to bless them for their holy function in the

Eucharist, and then there's a prayer of thanksgiving. And Cramer does something absolutely unique with the

Gloria in Ex Chelsis in that he puts it at the end of the service as the Song of Praise, and he takes that from one of the four biblical accounts of the institution of the

Lord's Supper. And then of course there's a blessing at the end. It's very radically different to the medieval mass in that what is at the heart of the service is not the elevation of the host, which had become the emotional and liturgical focus of the medieval mass, but the actual act of the communicants receiving the bread and the wine.

And this is where Cramer is so successful in getting reformed doctrine across through the liturgy.

Another aspect of Cramer's reform is he alters the visual side of the church.

English churches in the late 16th century, after the changes that Cramer in large measure fostered, were sort of looked pretty much like any other reformed church in the

Netherlands, in Switzerland, in those parts of Germany that were reformed.

They were cleansed of their images. Stained glass windows tended to survive because they were expensive to replace.

In fact, what you are speaking of now is very reflective of a beautiful church that was the

Episcopal Church in New York City, the

Episcopal Church of St. George's in Manhattan. Currently the rector there is a friend of mine,

Jacob Smith. It is still in the major Episcopal Church denomination, although Jacob Smith is very conservative, very biblically oriented, and very committed to the

Thirty -Nine Articles. Yes, he is. And he gave me a tour of the building, which was apparently designed, at least designed in part, by Stephen Ting, the 19th century

Low Church Episcopalian Calvinist rector there. In fact, that's why

Jacob took the call to that congregation, or at least why he initially pursued it, because he loved

Ting and the legacy that he has left. It's a beautiful church in its simplicity, and the way that Jacob described it, that he didn't want,

Ting did not want anything distracting from the pulpit where the

Word of God was being proclaimed, and that the Lord's table was a very simple table with the chalice and the plate for the bread, and there was no cross even, at least in fact to this day it looks exactly the way

Ting left it. The only thing that was hanging on the wall were the

Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments. That's quite normal for Anglican churches up until the middle of the 19th century.

Altar crosses are vanishingly rare in Anglicanism down to about 1860.

You might have got a couple of candles placed on the altar which were never lit unless it was dark enough for you to need artificial illumination.

In fact, Jacob has said that his colleagues who are

Low Churchmen, they have called those that become higher and higher in their liturgy, they have referred to it as climbing the candlestick.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that has to be remembered about Anglican worship 200 years ago, just to pick a round number, is it would have looked like Reformed worship in the

United States, particularly here in the South. To a large extent, you didn't really key into it being an

Episcopal service until you realized the minister was reading the liturgy from the

Book of Common Prayer. It looked pretty much like the Presbyterians down the street. The minister was wearing a black gown and bands.

It was well into the 19th century. Before hymns were universally accepted in Anglicanism, it had been pretty much a psalmody only denomination down to the 1780s.

Then hymns started creeping in through prayer meetings and Bible studies.

In fact, I'm going to have you pick up right where you left off, because we have to go to our first break right now. Okay. If anybody would like to join us on the air with your own question for Bishop Peter D.

Robinson, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today is

Bishop Peter D. Robinson, the presiding bishop of the United Episcopal Church of North America, and he's also the

Ordinary of the Missionary Diocese of the East and Rector of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

chrisarnzen at gmail .com if you have a question for Bishop Robinson. We are discussing the fall of the Episcopal Church and the rise of biblically faithful Episcopal bodies.

And before the break, you were discussing something that I did not know. You were saying that the majority of Anglicanism was dominated by exclusive psalmody until somewhere in the mid -19th century, was it?

Early to mid -19th century, depending on where you were. Was that also the case with strictly a cappella worship?

Because I know that... I read a really fascinating book called Old Light on New Worship by John Price, and he seems to have done exhaustive research, and he, in this book, dates the very first Presbyterian church in the

United States to have an organ to the 19th century. Organs go back further than that in Anglicanism.

One of the things that didn't get through the Convocation of 1563, of course the

Thirty -Nine Articles were one thing that did, was a motion to get rid of organs. So organs remained part of Anglican worship in the cathedrals and the large town parish churches all the way through, except for the interruption caused by the

Commonwealth in basically 1643 to the early 1660s.

But most parishes didn't have organs, and it would have been...

Was that by conviction, or they just couldn't afford it? They had small organs that wore out, and then they didn't replace them because they're in a period when, basically,

Reformed theology is dominant, and there just wasn't the desire to replace them.

But there was, I'm assuming from something you said earlier, there was a considerable movement in the

Anglican Church to be strictly a cappella. Yes, there was. Certainly most parish churches would not have used musical instruments until well into the 18th century.

The first evidence we have of parish bands is somewhere around 1720, although I haven't read

Tempoli recently, so I might be a bit off on that. Organs were certainly part of the

Restoration, i .e. 1660s onwards, tradition of worship, but they were used simply to accompany psalm singing in the parish churches.

Now, cathedrals were a different ballgame. The cathedral tradition maintained the choral service with complicated polyphony, which is where the works of Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Thomas Tompkins, Orlando Gibbons, they're all part of the cathedral tradition.

But there was very much a cathedral tradition and a parish church tradition from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and the two did not mix much.

So in an ordinary parish church, the liturgy would be read and the psalms would be sung unaccompanied until the early 18th century.

In the early 18th century, you begin to get parish bands, which often consisted of, say, a couple of fiddles, a cello, maybe a couple of wind instruments, and a group of singers who sat in the west gallery and led the singing from there.

Funnily enough, the expression facing the music comes from when they did sing an anthem, very often the congregation would stand up and turn around to face the western gallery to watch the singers perform.

Organs were comparatively rare. My home parish has had an organ of one sort or another since 1717, and it was a point of being a little bit more city than country that you had an organ.

Now, going back to your involvement in the United Episcopal Church of North America, we had you explain how it came into existence in the early 1980s, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes. So forgive me if you've mentioned this, I don't know if I may have been distracted by something technical on my end, but how were you specifically called into that denomination, and was there a choice that you had to make where you had to finally cut ties with another group, perhaps the major Episcopal church or what have you, if you could explain?

What happened with me was the parish I was in in Arizona back in 2006.

This was part of the Anglican Church in America, which was part of a larger group called the

Traditional Anglican Communion, and at that time they were exploring the possibility of becoming part of the

Roman Catholic Church. What finally triggered our decision to leave was the majority of the

House of Bishops, I think it was all but one, met in Portsmouth in the

United Kingdom and basically signed the Roman Catholic Catechism, indicating that they accepted nothing in it as being untrue.

Well, that was not a position I could accept.

Amen! So we called a parish meeting and voted to leave the

Anglican Church in America and affiliate to the United Episcopal Church, which

I knew to be a denomination which had the 39 articles as one of its declared standards.

And I'm assuming from everything that you've said is that you are a low -church Anglican? Oh, I take a little bit of explaining.

I'm actually close to being a low -church Anglican and closest to the old Protestant high churchmanship that existed before the

Tractarians. Okay, yes, I do know that high church versus low church does not mean

Anglo -Catholic versus Evangelical or Protestant, that there are high churchmen who are indeed 39 articles men and very

Calvinistic as well. Yes. One of the problems we have is that labels tend to be very elastic, and the labels tend to be very elastic.

And in the 18th century, a high churchman was someone who tended towards a high view of baptism and the

Lord's Supper. He believed in the primitive origin of Episcopacy and the threefold ministry as the way of organizing the church.

He was probably less strictly predestinarian, and also they preferred a formal liturgical service.

Now the low churchmen of the 18th century was your bare -bones, lowest common denominator

Protestant. They were latitudinarians. So they tended to downplay anything that made an

Anglican different to a Presbyterian that made a Presbyterian different to a congregation. They downplayed the denominational differences and also were, in their own way, quite liberal about theology, though what

I would say is that they believed the Bible and the creeds, but they weren't too much into denominational confessions.

Now, fast -forward that into the 19th century, and the

Evangelicals are in conflict with the Tractarians, and the Evangelicals who were not really identified as low churchmen in the 18th century adopted the label to distinguish themselves from the

Tractarians. In fact, we've got to pick up where you left off there again. I'm sorry we have to go to another station break, but that's the only way we can remain in existence.

Right. I hope you folks will be patient with us, because this is the longer than normal break in the middle of the show, because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show so that they can air their own public service announcements that localize

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to Lake City, Florida, a requirement of the FCC. So please be patient with us as we take this a little bit longer break, and use this time wisely.

Please write down as much of the information as provided by as many of our advertisers as you can, so that you can more successfully and more frequently patronize them, and that will further ensure that they will remain our advertisers, which will further ensure that we remain on the air, because we depend, absolutely depend upon the advertising finances that come in, and without them we would not exist.

So please write down the information provided by as many of our advertisers as you can, and write down questions for Bishop Peter D.

Robinson on the fall of the Episcopal Church and the rise of biblically faithful Episcopal bodies, or you can ask any question about the history and theology and doctrine of Anglicanism, and send those questions to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chris Arnzen at gmail .com. Always give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away, we'll be back with Bishop Peter D. Robinson right after these messages.

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Wow, that's some compliment. How much do I owe you for that? You don't have to owe me anything.

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Solid -Ground -Books .com Before we return to our discussion with Bishop Peter D. Robinson, Presiding Bishop of the

United Episcopal Church of North America, we just have a couple of important announcements to make. Thursday of this week, that's the 24th of September, we are having a return visit from my dear friend

Dr. Jeffrey C. Waddington, the pastor of the Faith Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Thorn Grove, Pennsylvania, who is continuing a series on the

Book of Romans on this program. I think this will be our third installment of his exegesis on the

Book of Romans. So I hope that you tune in and send in your questions. On Friday, we have a fascinating interview, my dear friend

Pastor Bill Shishko, formerly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Franklin Square, New York, where he was the pastor for many years, decades.

Pastor Shishko is currently the pastor of the... his church slipped out of my mind, the name of it...

The Haven, I'm sorry, The Haven, which is currently meeting in Bohemia, Long Island.

Well, he is going to be our guest on Iron Shepherd and Zion Radio with author Jennifer Greenberg, and they are going to be continuing a discussion that they both began on abuse in the church, whether it be spousal abuse or any kind of abuse, abuse by parents toward their children.

So this is going to be a very serious discussion on a serious problem that exists tragically even in the body of Christ.

So you don't want to miss out on this program on Friday the 25th of September.

And perhaps even especially tell anyone that you know who is a victim of spousal abuse or perhaps a victim of parental abuse, they do not want to miss this program this

Friday, September 25th with Pastor Bill Shishko and Jennifer Greenberg on abuse in the church.

And also, folks, if you love this show and you do not want it to disappear from the airwaves, please go to www .IronSherpandZionRadio

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Help us remain on the air. Go to www .IronSherpandZionRadio .com, click support, then click, click to donate now. You can also advertise with us as long as whatever it is you are promoting is compatible with what we believe.

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click support, then click, click to donate now. Also, folks, if you are not a member of a local

Bible -believing church, and you are not even prayerfully looking for one, you are living in disobedience to God, if that is the way you are accurately described.

There is no such thing in the scriptures as a lone wolf or maverick Christian who is not under the authority of local elders in a local congregation.

If you want to be honoring Christ, faithful to Christ, and obedient to Christ, you must be a member of a good solid church, if there is one that you can possibly attend near you.

So, please send me an email to ChrisArnsin at gmail .com and put, I need a church in the subject line, and hopefully

I will be able to help you find a church. I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the planet Earth, and I've already helped many people in our audience in all parts of the world find churches, sometimes within minutes away from where they live, and they didn't even know they existed.

Even if you are going on vacation somewhere, and you need a church recommendation, or if you have friends, family, and loved ones who live in all parts of the world who do not have a biblically faithful congregation that they are aware of near them,

I may be able to help. Send me that email to ChrisArnsin at gmail .com and put, I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Bishop Peter D.

Robinson, Presiding Bishop of the United Episcopal Church of North America. That's ChrisArnsin at gmail .com.

ChrisArnsin at gmail .com, and we are discussing the fall of the Episcopal Church and rise of biblically faithful Episcopal bodies.

And right before the midway break, Bishop Robinson, you may recall you were giving us the distinguishing marks between high churchmanship and low churchmanship, and as one might say, even though all

Anglo -Catholics are high churchmen, that doesn't mean all high churchmen are Anglo -Catholics.

Correct. The other thing is these labels are somewhat loose -fitting.

It's a little bit like the clothing from the store that people say is one size fits most. Probably the best way of describing high church these days tends to mean

Catholic leaning, low church tends to mean Protestant leaning, but there's so many exceptions and qualifications that you just take them for what the labels as just being broadly descriptive.

Certainly when we're discussing churchmanship and theological issues within the church, we're much more inclined to say

Anglo -Catholic, evangelical, liberal, middle -of -the -road than use the simple high church, low church split.

I know one of the things we're supposed to talk about today is what went wrong with the

Episcopal Church. Yes, and I remember you hinted at it before. You said it was a decline in the way the church viewed and adhered to the

Thirty -Nine Articles. Yes. One of the things that is...

The Episcopal Church in the United States has an unusual history in the sense that it's very much always been a minority church except pre -Revolution in Virginia, Maryland, and the

Carolinas where it was the established church. And as a consequence of that, the

Episcopal Church tended to define itself against the general religious culture of America.

And this helped on the process of the Episcopal Church becoming perhaps a little bit more

Catholic and a little bit more liberal than the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Although, in the 19th century, the Episcopal Church had a very strong evangelical movement.

You alluded to the ministry of Stephen Ting at St. George's, New York City.

Yes. That was one of the flagship evangelical Episcopal parishes of the mid -19th century.

The Diocese of Virginia was dominated by evangelical

Episcopalians from 1815 through to about 1900.

So there was a very strong evangelical movement in the Episcopal Church. Largely what

I would describe as low -Calvinist. Although, there was a very strong connection in the early days with Princeton and with the sort of Calvinist theology that was taught there.

And people like William Meade, who was the third Bishop of Virginia, John Johns, who succeeded him, were

Princeton -educated. And so they brought that sort of Calvinist theology into the

Episcopal Church. And it was very strong in the middle of the 19th century.

Evangelicalism probably produced something like 40 % of the diocesan bishops and 40 -45 % of the clergy in the middle of the 19th century.

And yet, if you say to someone today, evangelical

Episcopalian, they sort of look at you as though you've got two heads.

What went wrong, essentially, is in the third quarter of the 19th century, you have a series of conflicts between Tractarians and Evangelicals or Anglo -Catholics and Evangelicals, which marginalized the

Evangelical church with the Evangelical party within the church. So, for example, there's the

Cheney case in Chicago over modifications that the

Reverend Mr. Cheney made to the baptismal office because he couldn't accept the Anglo -Catholic view of baptismal regeneration.

There was a prosecution in the Diocese of New York of a...

I think it was actually one of Stephen Ting's sons was prosecuted for preaching in a

Presbyterian church by the bishop. And so the Evangelicals felt marginalized by the

Tractarians, and that led, in 1873, to the formation of the

Reformed Episcopal Church, which in turn siphoned off some of the

Evangelical leadership from the Protestant Episcopal Church. Within the

Evangelical movement, there's also the internal threat of higher criticism of the

Bible. And perhaps the best -known American supporter of that movement within Episcopalianism is

Phillips Brooks, who of course wrote the hymn O Little Town of Bethlehem. He had been educated at Harvard, went to Virginia Theological Seminary, where he was taught the usual Calvinist Episcopalian theology of VTS in those days.

But shortly after that, he became interested in what the German Biblical critics were saying about the origin and content of the

Bible. So what you get on the Evangelical side of Episcopalianism is a loss of some leadership to the

REC, the loss of other leaders to, say, Presbyterianism, or the

Dutch Reformed Church, and then you have a liberalization of the mainstream of Evangelical theology in the

Episcopal Church. And what tends to happen with the old Evangelicals in the late 19th century is their sons either become more liberal in their theology, or they leave the

Episcopal Church. So by 1900, the Evangelical movement is still around, but it's very much reduced from what it had been in, say, the 1860s, just before the war between the states.

It's lost a lot of men to liberalism. The Anglo -Catholic party in the

Episcopal Church is the one making all the noise. And also, there's a tendency,

I think, to regard Evangelicalism as being alien to the

Episcopal Church, because the Episcopal Church wants to see itself as being more historic, more

European, more Catholic, rather than the more strongly

Protestant identity that came from the Reformation and from the early days of the

Church in the United States and in the American colonies before that.

So, you know, that's part of the decline.

The other thing that goes along with this shift in the party politics, if you like, of the

Episcopal Church is the declining status of the Thirty -Nine Articles as the

Anglo -Catholic movement becomes more dominant. So in 1801, the

General Convention adopts an American revision of the Thirty -Nine Articles.

They drop one article which is wholly associated with the monarchy, and there are one or two other minor tweaks, but theologically, the 1801

Articles are identical to the 1563 Articles. There's no significant change there.

Then, in 1811, they declare the Thirty -Nine

Articles to be part of the core doctrine of the Church, part of the doctrine, discipline, and worship of this

Church. In the early 19th century, you will find, in general, the

Thirty -Nine Articles are treated as a touchstone of orthodoxy in the Protestant Episcopal Church, but their decline starts about 1850 with the rise of Tractarianism.

Now, Tractarianism has its origins in the University of Oxford, and in a sense, with the

Romantic movement culturally. And it represents an attempt to reinterpret the history of Anglicanism as being small

R, reformed, large C, Catholic. If you...

What I mean by that is that the reformed is incidental, the

Catholic is the essential. And it really doesn't have an historical basis in Anglicanism.

They try and make a case for their position out of little scraps of the Caroline Divines, who were a group of theologians who lived in the late 17th century.

They selectively misquote... I mean, the whole thing was blown up by Peter Knuckles, the

Oxford Movement in Context, when it was published in the mid -1990s. He lays out the case against the

Tractarian interpretation of the high church tradition. And one of the things that became very much a feature, not so much of British Anglo -Catholicism, but of American Anglo -Catholicism, was this quiet de -emphasization of the

Thirty -Nine Articles, the Protestant character of the prayer book, and that goes along with changing the appearance of churches.

So, we'll give another New York example. You have, you know,

St. George's, which has a very, sort of, Episcopal -Evangelical interior.

It focuses on the pulpit. If you go not that far across Manhattan, you get to St.

Mary's, just off Times Square, which is familiarly referred to as Smoky Mary's.

And there you have the dramatic altar with the big six candlesticks on it, the tabernacle for reserving the bread and the wine of the

Eucharist, and the service for many, many years, except for the fact that it was in English and had a nodding acquaintance with the

Book of Common Prayer, looked like the Tridentine Catholic Mass. And even if you go to the other congregation or building associated with St.

George's Episcopal Church, which is Calvary, which is why the parish is called the Parish of Calvary -St. George's, that other building is far more

Anglo -Catholic in appearance, even though it is led by low -church

Calvinists, it is, in appearance, more Catholic. Yeah, funnily enough, though, that was always an

Evangelical parish. Interesting. That was Sam Shoemaker's parish back in the 1920s and the 1930s.

Affiliated with the Shoemaker of the 12 -step program? The very same man.

Oh, yes, wow. And the third parish in that group was

Church of the Holy Communion, which was led by William Muhlenberg, the

Episcopal one, not the Lutheran one, although their, I think, great -uncle and great -nephew is their relationship, who introduced a high church strand of Evangelicalism into the

Episcopal Church, which came from his Lutheran background. So things like Deaconesses, Frequent Communion, often have their origins with what

Muhlenberg was doing at Church of the Holy Communion rather than with the Tractarians on their own.

What happens in the mid -19th century is essentially the old

Evangelical position just begins to fade, and it's replaced in the

Episcopal Church very often, either by Liberalism or by Anglo -Catholicism, and both

Liberalism and Anglo -Catholicism have two huge problems. Firstly, neither is really strong on the authority of Scripture.

The Liberals will happily debate how many of the epistles of St. Paul are genuine and what bits of those epistles are really by St.

Paul and which are editorial. They deconstruct the New Testament.

They've been deconstructing the Old Testament as early as 1800 in Berlin. The Anglo -Catholics tend to emphasize tradition, particularly the first seven ecumenical councils, and as a result of that,

Scripture becomes the foundation of Holy Tradition. It's an attitude not dissimilar to the

Eastern Orthodox. Scripture becomes the foundation of Holy Tradition, and you have to interpret

Scripture within the tradition. Now, some Anglo -Catholics acknowledge that the

Reformation was necessary but went too far, and others really don't want anything to do with it at all.

But this sort of theological incoherence fed through into the

Episcopal Church gradually becoming more hesitant about what it is. Then, of course, in the 1950s, with the tremendous upheaval that is coming in the

West, we always tend to think about the 60s as being the big upheaval, but intellectually, the foundations were laid immediately after World War II, and you have people like James Pike coming through as bishops who quite happily deny the doctrine of the

Trinity. And it takes quite a long time for the Episcopal Church to contemplate any sort of disciplinary action against someone who is denying the basic tenets of the faith.

In fact, we're going to pick up where you left off, and this is our final break, and it's going to be much more brief than the last two.

By the way, before we go to the break, I want to give two hearty recommendations especially to our

Anglican and Episcopalian listeners, but not exclusively, of course. We've been mentioning Stephen H.

Ting, the Low Churchman Calvinist Rector of St. George's Episcopal Church in the 19th century.

Well, Solid Ground Christian Books, our major sponsor of this program, they have at least two books that I'm aware of by Stephen Ting that I highly recommend.

The first is The Christian Pastor, The Office and Duty of the Gospel Minister, excellent book, and also reasonably short, but not too short, and excellent kind of a book where you could buy many copies and give them out to friends, family, and loved ones, perhaps even especially those that you know who are in the ministry.

The other book by Stephen H. Ting is Lectures on the Law and Gospel, and you can get them at Solid -Ground -Books .com

Solid -Ground -Books .com We're going to be right back with Bishop Peter D.

Robinson right after these messages, so don't go away. As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

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Don't forget to ask about their discount generic drug program. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnson and this is our final segment of our interview today with Bishop Peter D.

Robinson of the United Episcopal Church of North America. And I'm sure if he is willing and God is willing, he will be returning for future visits.

I'm already completely fascinated by this dear brother and his knowledge of the history of the

Episcopal Church and its downfall and also the rise of biblically faithful Episcopal bodies.

And before the break, as you may remember, you were just beginning to discuss the arch nemesis of biblically faithful Anglicanism and that's

Bishop Pike. Yeah, and Pike was the symptom not the cause in many respects.

He sort of manifested the quiet crisis that was going on in the

Episcopal Church in the 50s and the 60s as an increasing amount of the leadership became committed to for want of a better word

I would call revisionism. And this began feeding through into denominational policy in the late 1960s.

So you have the Episcopal Church's brief flirtation with the

Black Panthers. You have moves towards the ordination of women

You have the revision of the prayer book. What they're trying to do is the old, old theme of liberalism in any denomination is creating a modern church for modern man.

The problem with that is that if we take our Bible seriously the one thing we quickly realize is that man is just as much a sinner now as he was in the

Garden of Eden when Adam fell. A modern man, in a sense, is a myth.

We have modern technology. We have modern ideas.

But it's still the same fallen humanity that's in need of a savior. And the

Episcopal Church really lost sight of that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and tried to become a modern, up -to -date organization.

The trouble is, in doing so, they lost much of what is fundamental to Christianity.

And although the ordination of women is an issue that gets you accused of being sexist, it isn't really, because in order to ordain women you have to come up with a whole different hermeneutic of Scripture.

How you understand the Scriptures has changed radically. And you begin picking and choosing those bits of the

Bible that you accept. In fact, the same hermeneutic will most often lead to the acceptance of homosexuality and the murder of unborn children and many other things like that.

Yeah, it's a real camel getting his nose under the tent flap issue.

Because if you accept the ordination of women, hermeneutically speaking, you have no way of arguing effectively against abortion, the ordination of practicing homosexuals, the whole list of liberal causes that have been rampant in society for the last 40 -50 years.

And as a result of that, there was basically a second departure from the

Episcopal Church. Now, the first departure took place in the third quarter of the 19th century when the

Reformed Episcopal Church left in the United States, the Free Church of England left in England, the

Church of England in South Africa left the main Anglican body in South Africa.

All in the 1870s, 1880s, or a little bit before on the issue of the

Catholic revival, Tractarianism, Anglo -Catholicism. Then you get this second departure in the 1960s and the 1970s over the creeping liberalism of the

Episcopal Church. Unfortunately, the 1970s continuous split amongst themselves between those for whom biblical authority is the most important, and those who are attached to the old

Catholic, to the Catholic side of Anglicanism. And unfortunately, in 1977 when the main departure from the

Episcopal Church took place, they wrote a document called the Affirmation of St. Louis, which is brilliant in terms of identifying the problems of Episcopalian liberalism, you know, its low view of Scripture, its acceptance of an easy attitude to divorce, its weakness on the sanctity of human life.

It's very good at diagnosing the problem, but it fixes it by committing continuing

Anglicans of that stripe to the seven ecumenical councils and to a very sort of tradition - orientated

Catholic take on Anglicanism. And that wasn't acceptable to everyone. So, the

United Episcopal Church was formed, which went back to the

Bible, 39 Articles, Prayer Book, Recipe of Anglicanism.

And it has been a very, in many ways, very difficult path, because for a start, the other

Anglicans don't always like you very much. The which Anglicans don't like you very much?

The Catholic Anglicans don't like you very much because you're maintaining the Protestant tradition of Anglicanism.

Right. And then, of course, the big Episcopal Church doesn't like you because you left.

Right. So, as a movement, we've always stayed relatively small, but we seem to get very,

I wouldn't say widespread support, but there's a lot of interest in a return to a more confessional approach to Anglicanism.

It's like, we know the Episcopal Church doesn't work. We know Anglo -Catholicism leads to either

Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, ultimately. So, what it is that's of lasting value in Anglicanism must come from its

Reformation tradition. And so, what I've been seeing over the last ten years is an uptick in interest in what

Anglicanism was like before the Tractarians. And how can we bring that into the modern day?

And hence, we have denominations such as the United Episcopal Church of North America and others.

And I'm going to take some of our listener questions before we run out of time because they've been, I hope they've been patiently waiting, but they've been waiting for quite a while.

We have a first -time questioner and, by the way, some of these questions were written over a half hour ago by our listeners.

Well, they were sent to us over a half hour ago anyway. So, some of these things you may have touched on, but perhaps you could expand on them for the sake of those who have been waiting to have their question asked.

We have Jack from Buffalo, New York, a first -time questioner. What is or should

I say, what in the Episcopal Church led to the revision update of the 1928

Book of Common Prayer in 1945? Basically, a feeling that they needed a more flexible lectionary.

There wasn't an awful lot done in 1945 other than the new sequence of lessons for morning and evening prayer and some additional family and optional prayers that were added at that date.

But the main thing was to provide a new lectionary which would reflect the thematic approach to the

Bible that was becoming popular with the higher critics of the

Bible. Well, thank you, Jack, and if you send us your full mailing address, since you are a first -time questioner, you are going to receive a brand new

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers who sponsor Iron Trip and Zion Radio. That will be sent to you by cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. cvbbs .com We have

Ted in Moundville, Alabama. What is your guess assessment of the ACNA, Anglican Church of North America, revision of the

Common Book of Prayer that was published just last year? It's better than 1979.

But it still has a lot of problems. And I have heard from, and I know that I'm probably going to get people angry at me for this, but I have even heard from members, rectors in the

ACNA, that there's problems in general in the ACNA. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately,

I have the typical English tendency to sarcasm. I often say that the

ACNA at times looks like 32 dioceses looking for a church. Because there's such a contrast in views.

You have on the one hand the Missionary Diocese of All Saints, which is basically an

Anglo -Catholic grouping. And then on the other extreme you have churches for the sake of others,

C4SO, which frankly to an outsider just looks like a woke, charismatic church that happens to be

Anglican in its structure. And how such a diverse organization can hang together long term is a really significant question, which hasn't been answered yet.

Well, we have... And many of these people are good Christian brothers and sisters.

And I've got, you know, quite a few friends in ACNA, but there is that question about it.

We do have a question from Bruce, and Bruce is in Hoover, Alabama, another

Alabama resident. Thank you, Chris and Peter, for this great show. Can you please explain what is meant with the categorization of Anglicans slash

Episcopalians as liberals and Anglo -Catholic? Have there been and are there currently any other factions in the

Anglican Episcopal Church today that are at war with each other and have led to the destruction of the true

Episcopal Church in the USA? I think the major fight in America with the

Episcopal Church has been really a denial of its

Protestant roots in favor of a liberal Catholic reinterpretation of the

Church. What I would tend to describe the modern

Episcopal Church as being high and wide in that there's a lot of ceremonial, but theologically it tends to be extremely diverse and extremely liberal.

And I think that tendency towards liberalism and Anglo -Catholicism is what has really messed up the

Episcopal Church in this country. And Bruce follows up with I'm in the

Thomas Cranmer camp 1928 -1662 prayer book camp. So what flavor of Episcopalian -Anglican does that make me?

I would probably put you with the UEC. That would make you definitely on the conservative wing.

It's not guaranteed. I need to know a little bit more about his theological stance.

We have an anonymous listener who says I have a number of close friends in the

Reformed Episcopal Church who are lamenting that the very reason that that denomination was started as a response to the rise of Oxford movement

Anglo -Catholics has been abandoned and they are welcoming many

Anglo -Catholics into the priesthood. Is this what you have witnessed yourself?

Yes. The REC changed direction in the early 1980s and initially it went much more towards what

I would call mainstream Low Church Episcopalianism, which was fine. They had rather painted themselves into a corner but that's kind of carried on and now with their involvement with ACNA they've certainly taken an option towards a much more

Catholic approach to issues of ceremonial and worship than was traditionally the case in the

REC. We have another anonymous listener who says

I have heard that the only thing keeping many if not most Anglo -Catholic bishops from converting to Roman Catholicism and bringing their congregations with them is the fact that they would lose their status in hierarchy as bishops and be reduced to lowly priests.

Is this true? I think some

Anglo -Catholics are much more attracted by Eastern Orthodoxy. But again, the same problem would apply.

Certainly I have seen enough Anglo -Catholics overcome their aversion to Rome once there was enough pressure on them from the liberal side for them to go.

So I think it's an exaggeration but I don't think it's untrue as such.

It's interesting that you said that about Eastern Orthodoxy because my grandmother's priest in the local

Episcopal Church in Amityville, Long Island St. Mary's Episcopal Church Fr.

Geminder who I like him very much as a person but definitely on the opposite end of the justification by faith alone tradition that I hold to he has been considering converting to Eastern Orthodoxy and bringing the congregation with him because of the liberalism that he despises in the

Episcopal Church. Yeah that's it's not a common track with Anglo -Catholic parishes but it does happen that they go towards either

Eastern Orthodoxy or the Western Rite used under the jurisdiction of an

Eastern Orthodox bishop. we are out of time and I definitely want to have you back on the program in fact if you could hold on when we go off the air because I'd like to schedule another interview with you if you are agreeable to that and I want to thank you so much for being such a fascinating guest today and I want to remind our listeners of how they can get in contact with you and your denomination.

You can go to unitedepiscopal .org unitedepiscopal .org

unitedepiscopal .org Do you have any other contact information that you care to share? We're also on Facebook Okay and look for United Episcopal Church of North America on Facebook Also I want to clarify something for our listeners who were interested in purchasing those books by Stephen Ting the

Low Church Episcopalian Rector at St. George's in New York City in the 19th century his last name is spelled

T -Y -N -G so if you put that name in the search engine at solid -ground -books .com

solid -ground -books .com all of the books that they carry and publish by Stephen H.

Ting will be there for you to see. That's T -Y -N -G I want to thank you so much

Bishop Robinson for being such a wonderful guest. I want to thank everybody who listened today especially those who took the time to write in we apologize to anybody that didn't have time that we didn't have time to have their questions asked and answered on the air and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater