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Showing posts from June, 2008

GAFCON messages

Just in case you are not aware of it, Kevin at anglicantv.org has several addresses to the GAFCON assembly on his blog. I highly recommend you to view them.

A Successor Collection?

I appreciate Bishop Duncan’s address to GAFCON this past week. The text may be found here: http://www.acn-us.org/etc/2008/anglicanism-come-of-age.pdf Much of what he says is helpful and I recommend it to my readers. My only question, at first reading, is about what he says regarding the need for the Anglican Church to develop “some successor collection to the 1662 Book of Common prayer….” He is right to say that there needs to be liturgical uniformity in the Communion and that much uniformity has been lost (thanks, as I understand it, to the innovative service books of the West – there may be other influences of which I am uninformed). However, must some new “collection” be the answer? I do not believe there is anything wrong with the 1662 tradition. It has, theologically and liturgically, what we are concerned to be maintained in the Communion. Provision is already made in the rubrics for “occasional services” which allow creative use of the Prayer Book. Why not ...

Thoughts on the Spiritual Life - XLII - H. C. G. Moule

Gates to Trinity College, Cambridge. Chapter XI, continued. ii. As one part of this general subject, I lay it upon myself and my reader, as we seek to live day by day in the strength of the risen Jesus Christ, all the more to lean our experience before God wholly, solely, upon the finished Work of our redeeming Sacrifice, “the Lord our Righteousness.” The holy thirst and hunger to please God is a radically different thing from the anxious effort to reconcile God. Blessed be His name, that work is done, is completed, for us, by the obedience of One. In the deep words of the Second Article, “Christ, very God and very man, truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of men.” And in the words of the Eleventh, never to be separated from those others, “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith ...

Thoughts on the Spiritual Life - XLI - H. C. G. Moule

H. C. G. Moule, M.A., Principal of Ridley Hall, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Bishop of Durham XI. Concluding Thoughts In closing these simple pages, let me put before my friend and reader a few remarks, somewhat detached in form. i. First, an earnest caution against an overdrawn introspection . It may be thought that this book itself looks another way, often suggesting and encouraging a close inward examination. I do indeed seek to press, on myself first, the duty of self-examination, a scrutiny within that shall not stop short of motive, purpose, inmost state of affection and will. Many Christian lives, I am sure, greatly lose in depth, consistency, and chastened soberness, by failure to examine within; and the habit and practice of such examination, not without a certain system, is a duty of Christian life. For most of us it would be well to make this exercise a regular element, say, in secret evening devotion. Nevertheless, introspection is a sec...