Image: crop of Saint Peter and Saint Paul: Artist: El Greco (1541-1614)  This is the text from my sermon recently. It is an understatement to say that the institution of the church in the western world today is in a mess.  There has been so much compromise and so much worldliness that the idea of a true Christian in the mind of many observers outside the Church is very confused indeed.  To whom do we point today to say, "That's a Christian?"   Is it Joel Olsteen?  Is it Pope Francis?  Is it Bishop Gene Robinson in the Episcopal Church?  All these people believe very different things and live very different lives.   Well, today we are remembering the apostles Peter and Paul , and I think it's safe to say that they were true Christians.  Thankfully we know what they would say about it all , for we can read their opinion in the New Testament.  As for Paul , he tells us here in our lesson from Ephesians - in verse 20 - that the...

It may be easy to see how the Gospels are "inspired," but what about the rest of the New Testament?  Article VI of the XXXIX Articles states: VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation . Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation. In the name of the Holy Scripture we do understand those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church. ... All the Books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and account them Canonical. So what's the rationale for this? Apostolic authority, for one thing. Jesus promised that the Spirit would bring all things to the disciples's remembrance. John 14:25,26 25 “These things I have spoken to you while being prese...

But what about praying to God for the saints departed, as we do in the communion service? This is different.  We certainly do not believe we should pray for those saints who have gone before us so that they will be delivered out of Purgatory, which is a lot of the kind of praying that has been done for the saints in the past.  But there is no reason why we cannot pray for God’s blessing on those for whom we have prayed all their lives beforehand.  They are still finite creatures, dependent on the mercy and grace of God, and we can pray for their enjoyment of the blessings of God as a way of identifying with them and continuing to express our love and care for them to God. We pray for all the saints and, in a way that is real, we all meet together before the same throne in prayer.  It’s a way of experiencing what the creed calls the Communion of the Saints.  Even though we are in two different places, we are still all one in Christ, sharing His life, and conc...

What about prayer to the saints, asking them to pray for us to God? Bishop Wright gives us part of the answer in his book For All the Saints.  He explains that the idea of praying to the saints as if they are representatives for us before the throne of God came out of the medieval idea of the royal court.  Someone living in a rural area, miles away from where the royal court may be held, could not petition the king for his needs.  However, if he had a friend at the court, he could ask that friend to plead his cause for him.  You can see how this could lead people to think about the divine court; a friend or a relative has now died and gone to the court of heaven and, perhaps if we ask them to, they will pray for us there. The problem is that this idea of needing others to address God for us in his court is wholly unnecessary.  The biblical doctrine is plain that all the saints, either those militant or triumphant, have the same access to God the Father, thro...

Are The Saints a special category of believers? We do not find a category of especially su ccessful saints in the New Te st ament , having some peculiar place and privile ge.  All the saints are the sanctified in Christ, righteous by the mercy of God, and all the recipients of the same mercy.  The whole church is called “the saints”; all who are saved are set apart as holy unto God by virtue of faith in Christ. Indeed, we may be mistaken in our own estimate as to who has been a better Christian than another.  Jesus speaks of this in Matthew 20:1-16, the parable of the workers in the vineyard.  Some worked all day, some only worked the last hour or so.  The farmer gave them all a penny. 10: But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. 11: And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, 12: Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast mad...

All this week, I'll be answering frequently asked questions about "the saints" - hopefully an interesting and edifying exercise. Who are the saints? The people of God; the Church of all the ages.  In the Old Testament, two words are used for the word saint.  They are found most frequently in the Psalms, but elsewhere also, including verses that the New Testament likes to quote or refer to.   In the Old Testament, we have: a.    hasid ; meaning righteous , referring to their character.  It is related to the word hesed for mercy , and well should it be so.  The saints are the objects of God’s mercy toward sinners.  No one is righteous but that God has made him so in a wonderful act of mercy. b.    kadosh ; refers to their being separated unto God: sanctified , which is related to the word saint itself.  This emphasises how the saints belong to God.  They are His people.  In the New Testament, the word used...

I'm still reading this thing, and want to understand it thoroughly. I have read enough, at this point, to note that they disdain biblical exegesis of implied meaning as "weak" and therefore insufficient to counter their arguments for women's ordination. At one point, they quote the esteemed Jefferson Davis on slavery as a way of arguing their point. It is evident that their thinking is clouded. First of all, it is the Reformed position that Biblical truth is equally authoritative be it expressly stated or derived by "good and necessary consequence."* Now, the reformers knew the laws of Logic; they were classically educated. They knew that there was such a thing as a bad use of Logic. They believed that if something in Scripture could be proven by " good and necessary consequence", not just any consequence, then it was to be held. In this, they follow the example of the Lord Jesus Himself in Matthew 22 when he confronted the Saducees for not kno...

Join in and list the reasons why you believe - or one of your favourite authors believes - the traditional liturgy is appropriate for what the Church and the world need today. If the comments feature doesn't work for you, send me an e-mail and I'll list it for you. [26 April: Yes, I'm keeping this one up for a while] Here's why: 1) Its reverent form confronts us with the holiness of God. 2) The implicit hierarchy represents a biblical world view. 3) Its classic formality and beauty beats the weekly attempts at trying to come up with an order of service hands down. 4) It connects us with the universal church across time. 5) The presence of variety in certain elements engages one's interest. 6) The presence of sameness frees one from distractions so that one may focus on the devotional spirit. See the first chapter in Letters to Malcolm by C. S. Lewis. Lots of good comments there. For example: [...the traditional liturgy] "works" best - wh...

"Further, I believe ... that the God in whom we trust for the fulfillment of the promise is also the Creator of the universe and Lord of history in a manner that assures a certain correspondence, albeit disordered by sin, between His will and human reason and the laws of nature. As a result, ethics grounded in and thoroughly compatible with Christian faith is “accessible” also to non-Christians. It is, in other words, a public ethic. The Christian tradition provides various ways of describing such an ethic—e.g., natural law, common grace, orders of preservation, the twofold kingdom. This is the ethic that is pertinent to the right ordering of the earthly polis, and Christians are not “compromised” when they employ it. Indeed they have a Christian duty to do so. Why there should be such a public ethic is itself part of the Christian story about the nature of God’s world." Source: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5704

Peter addresses Cornelius I had another conversation recently with some folks regarding "infant baptism." Those of us who belong to churches that baptize infants need to quit using that term. It gives the "Baptists" - to use a generic term - a foot in the door. To begin with, arguments for baptizing infants are usually pitiful: "Jesus said to not forbid the children and surely there were infants in the household baptisms in Acts." Such arguments do not prove the position. The Baptists are correct that the Bible does not anywhere state expressly that infants of believing parents are to be baptized. What they cannot deny is that it does speak of Christian households that are baptized. When we point that out to them, then they are on the defensive and argue from silence ("they must have all professed the faith"), not us. One cannot understand the doctrine of baptism without understanding accompanying doctrines, such as the doctrine of the Church ...

An excellent article at Anglican Mainstream .

I'm finding Fr. Brian Douglas' blog very interesting. You may want to check it out.

Last Supper - Durer The night of the Passover from its very beginning was a night of both fear and comfort. It was a night of fear, because it was a night of the judgment of God. The angel of death went throughout all of Egypt to destroy the first-born of every creature. As Cecil B. DeMille depicts the night in his movie, The Ten Commandments , the whole land would have echoed with screams of terror and sorrow that night. But, in the house of all those, Jew or Gentile, that had obeyed Moses and placed the blood of the lamb upon the posts and lintels of their doorways, there was comfort. The comfort was not just that the angel of death would pass them. The comfort was that the day of deliverance had finally come. This was God’s last stroke upon Pharoah which would make him let His people go. It was a feast of comfort that 400 years of slavery under Egypt ’s yoke had come to an end. The day of redemption had finally dawned for God’s people. How much more was the nigh...

An address to the recent Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston . Compliments of David Virtue - thank you, brother! From the address: "Finally, the preachers among us do need to learn to expound the scriptures. I have found almost nobody in Episcopal circles doing this during my two and a half years in the country. Our job is not to use a text of scripture as a springboard for our own ideas, but to allow the text to impact the hearers with the greatest clarity and force. We are to be servants of the Word, breaking it up into bite-sized portions so that people can understand its meaning and context and can apply it to their own lives. Some of the Baptists are good at this, but few Episcopalians. It is an area we need to work at if we really believe that scripture is God's revelation, not mere human speculation." This is so true!!!

A lot of people are talking about the Archbishop's comments on Christmas in his interview with Simon Mayo of BBC Radio 5 on Sunday. Even Rush Limbaugh today spoke of it. He complained about Williams denying the virgin birth. While I thought Limbaugh's complaint about "liberals" denying the basic tenets of Christianity while still calling themselves Christians was correct, the Archbishop did not deny the virgin birth. The conversation was about the typical "Nativity scene" depictions and what is or is not historic about them. When it came to the virgin birth, Williams said that he is "committed to it", but that belief in it was a process in his life. What concerns me was his further comment that he did not think that belief in the virgin birth was a hurdle that people should have to jump in order for them to be "signed up" in the Church. I have to disagree with that. While I believe it is certainly possible for people to come to faith in C...

When Christ emptied Himself and became a man (Phil. 2), he did not veil his divinity but revealed it. He showed us the humility of God. As he walked among us He told us that, if we have seen Him, we have seen the Father. How? Certainly, according to Phil. 2, in one sense especially: the Father - indeed, the whole Godhead - is humble.

The following is the body of an e-mail I wrote to a friend about my previous post. On your first paragraph, I see the challenge to be: 1) to maintain the tension between the poles of truths revealed to us in a "dialectic" form. Rev. Rob Rayburn of Seattle (PCA) has a remarkable series of sermons on this subject: http://www.faithtacoma.org/sermons/Scripture/Reading.htm but you are familiar with the idea, for example, the tension between "all of grace" on one side and "human responsibility" on the other regarding salvation. To quote Rayburn: "I am speaking of the fact that biblical truth is universally presented in dialectical form. By that I mean that the Bible characteristically presents any doctrine in terms of its polarities. The truth concerning any particular subject or theme is taught, now in one place, now in another, in terms of the poles that lie at the opposite ends of the particular continuum." 2) to give credit to each passage of Sc...

With the current controversy over the Pope's recent declarations in the air, I thought a reading of Toon's recent quotation from Hooker on the Roman Church would be interesting for us. Toon builds upon Hooker's comments about Rome to consider how we are to think of TEC.

I was recently at a party where I met a woman who had left the PCA and was attending an Episcopal church in town. Her reason for doing so was that she liked to see “both sides of God” represented in the liturgy; she specified the presence of both men and women in officiating capacities. Such an idea, that God is both Father and Mother, is hardly a biblical concept. Simply look at a concordance. There is no defining, categorical statement that God = mother. A passage or two may be found where his compassion and mercy are compared to that of a mother, but that does not define him as a mother. His compassion is elsewhere compared to that of a father and even a chicken. These are similies, not definitions. If you want motherhood identified in the Church, well, it is the Church herself. St. Paul, Gal.4;26: "But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all." If you look for references to God as Father in the concordance, the contrast with the la...

You can read a tract written by Ryle on the Thirty-Nine articles here . It is from his book Knots Untied .