AN EMBOLDENED ANGLICANISM
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
October 3, 2012
Anglicanism has a heroic history. To acknowledge this is not to praise human courage and endurance in terms of hero worship, but to recognize the gifts of boldness and perseverance bestowed upon the people of God by the Holy Spirit in the cause of the Gospel. There have been many martyrs, many imprisoned, many impeded by authority in their ministries, and many who launched out into danger and public disgrace for the sake of making the Lord Jesus Christ and his saving compassion known to the masses of the lost.
Their stories are poignant and inspiring. John Bradford was brave under the pressure of persecution and the sentence of death. Bilney and Cranmer caved at first, but the recovery of their courage redounds to the grace of God towards his chosen ones in seasons of severe affliction. Davenant refused to be curtailed in his preaching of sovereign grace by edict of king and archbishop and suffered immense humiliation. Whitefield crossed the Atlantic repeatedly in his ministry of evangelism and was often subjected to personal danger for the sake of the Word. Ryle was amazingly steady under the sorrows he bore throughout his life - the loss of his family banking business and consequent settlement of debts incurred, and heavy bereavement at the death of two wives. Simeon's ministry was opposed by university and ecclesiastical authorities, and William Romaine was confronted with almost interminable malice on the part of those who took offence at the Gospel to which he dedicated his life and energy so resolutely. These are only a few examples of the men, and women, who suffered shame, sadness, injury, peril, and loss of personal comfort and even life for the truth of divine revelation and saving light.
The great hazard for the advocates of the Gospel is loss of nerve. Every believer is weak. We delude ourselves, as did Peter, if we think that we have any strength of our own. Even without reckoning with sin, the human constitution is frail by divine design. We were always meant to be reliant on God and should have been content to remain so. Our weakness is a fundamental characteristic of our creature-hood. It follows that our Christian leadership and ministry is weak and our dependence upon God absolute. Who is sufficient in their calling? No one. And therefore there is a tendency to tamper with the truth in its harder aspects. Ministers need the love and support of the people and loss of that love and support can jeopardize ongoing ministry and so sometimes the message is tailored for approval or even applause.
False teaching is not only affirmative but compromising with public opinion. False teaching is not necessarily negation of Scripture but imbalance in its presentation. The pendulum swings in dependence on circumstances and the composition of audiences. The false teacher is not necessarily a pedlar of lies (peddler - U.S.) but a merchant of half truths. The Gospel may easily become consumer oriented. That will guarantee big congregations but heavy eternal losses for mislead souls. The penalty for false prophets will be harsh - meddling with the Word of heaven and misdirecting poor souls to hell.
In a crumbling culture ignorant of the message of mercy, or indifferent and impertinent towards it, Anglicanism, along with every other worthy Christian tradition, bears the onus of speaking with candor to our generation. Much ground has been lost in this venture due to the waywardness of the church and the willfulness of sinful society. The church wants significance and kudos in our time but at the inestimable cost of the sacrifice of truth. Would our forebears look at us and remark, "You've got a nerve."? We have probably lost it, caught up in the values and standards of our culture. It is so crippling and we can be so craven. We can be so easily tempted to scratch the itching ear or tickle the fancy of the people. Mega-churches may not be evidence of grace but proof that we have given-in, in our loyalty to the Gospel (Who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings. - Isaiah 1:12).
The Gospel is not good news in the sense that it cossets us in our sin, but convicts us discomfortingly in order to find our consolation in Christ. Anglicanism must be bold in spelling out the true human condition to those who must concede their need of a Savior. Our platitudinous and sentimental doctoring of the Gospel leaves sinners exposed to the wrath to come and eternal deprivation of the favor of God. It is as blunt as that. Our sinful appetite necessitates the Gospel emetic.
Not everyone responds to the Gospel with the same degree of comprehension and intensity of feeling, but it is incumbent upon us to preach up guilt as much as grace or we shan't convey the vital need of grace and its infinite dimensions of pure mercy. Law and grace are the necessary components of the divine message. Because legalism and dourness may prevail in some circles it should not curtail faithfulness to the full-orbed proclamation of the Word which carries its own wisdom in spite of our desire to act as its editors and improvers.
The Holy Spirit is fully aware and competent in his ministry of the application of saving truth. We are ambassadors not authors, and have no right to tweak the import of our Sovereign's dispatches to mankind - rebels being granted a reprieve of sentence and the promise of redemption. Only admission of our offences and moral helplessness can cause us to worthily appreciate grace. Cheap grace abounds. The cross does not signify cheap grace but great grace which is welcomed by great sinners who need to know the dimensions of their miscreancy so that they will flee to Christ as the only remedy for ruined souls. People in the doctor's waiting room know that they have a problem and have come to their physician for healing. A cover-up may be fatal. Non-attendance may result in a funeral.
We have Articles ix and x to work through on the way to the glorious news of article xi - which means nothing without the knowledge of guilt and helplessness. The Biblical formula is pessimism with regard to man and optimism with reference to God. What a splendid transformation in outlook. As Luther has said, he found "the ladder to heaven", not a few steps upward in vain and futile human self-improvement and indulgence in mere religiosity. The Gospel is a life and death matter. God is not merely an adornment to life here to pretty things up in an ornamental sense. He is our only hope for blessing and the vision of himself for endless aeons. And so we do not shy away –even in an age of superficial sophistication and mockery of God - from the facts of original sin (the infection of evil) the enslaved will (bound to yield to our base affections and damaged reason with an inbred antipathy to God and righteousness) so that against this dark background the brilliance of the divine kindness stands out brighter than the blaze of the noonday sun.
Depravity must precede and emphasize the blessed relief of deliverance in human awareness. In our impotence we confide in the rescue operation of our God entirely and that is a foretaste of our heavenly Sabbath rest. End of works. Beginning of bliss. How indispensable and sweet our Saviour and big brother becomes. At hand in our helplessness and unworthiness and with us now forever - from wretchedness to wealth in the generosity of God. What harm can come from an accurate diagnosis of our spiritual condition and an appropriate administration of the divine remedy?
We must be bold in the enunciation of truth, tell it as it is, and what it can be in and because of Christ. Contamination and cleansing in the light of the moral demands of a holy God is a complete communication of the salvation wrought by God, and both elements contribute to the realization that the message we cherish and declare is imbued with divine kindness in our justification by grace reconciled by the accomplishment of the Redeemer. Lopsided teaching and preaching is ultimately loveless as well as erroneous, and in avoiding the fact of sin and lost-ness, craven and indulgent of carnal preference.
Our softness towards sin is evident in the omission of the opening sentences of the 1662 BCP in the revised liturgies. This leads to the erosion or elimination of the sense of need for repentance and the casualty is the loss of a strong sense of grace. We must cry to God in the words of the title of Richard Pape's wartime memoirs, "Boldness Be My Friend".
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org
October 3, 2012
Anglicanism has a heroic history. To acknowledge this is not to praise human courage and endurance in terms of hero worship, but to recognize the gifts of boldness and perseverance bestowed upon the people of God by the Holy Spirit in the cause of the Gospel. There have been many martyrs, many imprisoned, many impeded by authority in their ministries, and many who launched out into danger and public disgrace for the sake of making the Lord Jesus Christ and his saving compassion known to the masses of the lost.
Their stories are poignant and inspiring. John Bradford was brave under the pressure of persecution and the sentence of death. Bilney and Cranmer caved at first, but the recovery of their courage redounds to the grace of God towards his chosen ones in seasons of severe affliction. Davenant refused to be curtailed in his preaching of sovereign grace by edict of king and archbishop and suffered immense humiliation. Whitefield crossed the Atlantic repeatedly in his ministry of evangelism and was often subjected to personal danger for the sake of the Word. Ryle was amazingly steady under the sorrows he bore throughout his life - the loss of his family banking business and consequent settlement of debts incurred, and heavy bereavement at the death of two wives. Simeon's ministry was opposed by university and ecclesiastical authorities, and William Romaine was confronted with almost interminable malice on the part of those who took offence at the Gospel to which he dedicated his life and energy so resolutely. These are only a few examples of the men, and women, who suffered shame, sadness, injury, peril, and loss of personal comfort and even life for the truth of divine revelation and saving light.
The great hazard for the advocates of the Gospel is loss of nerve. Every believer is weak. We delude ourselves, as did Peter, if we think that we have any strength of our own. Even without reckoning with sin, the human constitution is frail by divine design. We were always meant to be reliant on God and should have been content to remain so. Our weakness is a fundamental characteristic of our creature-hood. It follows that our Christian leadership and ministry is weak and our dependence upon God absolute. Who is sufficient in their calling? No one. And therefore there is a tendency to tamper with the truth in its harder aspects. Ministers need the love and support of the people and loss of that love and support can jeopardize ongoing ministry and so sometimes the message is tailored for approval or even applause.
False teaching is not only affirmative but compromising with public opinion. False teaching is not necessarily negation of Scripture but imbalance in its presentation. The pendulum swings in dependence on circumstances and the composition of audiences. The false teacher is not necessarily a pedlar of lies (peddler - U.S.) but a merchant of half truths. The Gospel may easily become consumer oriented. That will guarantee big congregations but heavy eternal losses for mislead souls. The penalty for false prophets will be harsh - meddling with the Word of heaven and misdirecting poor souls to hell.
In a crumbling culture ignorant of the message of mercy, or indifferent and impertinent towards it, Anglicanism, along with every other worthy Christian tradition, bears the onus of speaking with candor to our generation. Much ground has been lost in this venture due to the waywardness of the church and the willfulness of sinful society. The church wants significance and kudos in our time but at the inestimable cost of the sacrifice of truth. Would our forebears look at us and remark, "You've got a nerve."? We have probably lost it, caught up in the values and standards of our culture. It is so crippling and we can be so craven. We can be so easily tempted to scratch the itching ear or tickle the fancy of the people. Mega-churches may not be evidence of grace but proof that we have given-in, in our loyalty to the Gospel (Who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings. - Isaiah 1:12).
The Gospel is not good news in the sense that it cossets us in our sin, but convicts us discomfortingly in order to find our consolation in Christ. Anglicanism must be bold in spelling out the true human condition to those who must concede their need of a Savior. Our platitudinous and sentimental doctoring of the Gospel leaves sinners exposed to the wrath to come and eternal deprivation of the favor of God. It is as blunt as that. Our sinful appetite necessitates the Gospel emetic.
Not everyone responds to the Gospel with the same degree of comprehension and intensity of feeling, but it is incumbent upon us to preach up guilt as much as grace or we shan't convey the vital need of grace and its infinite dimensions of pure mercy. Law and grace are the necessary components of the divine message. Because legalism and dourness may prevail in some circles it should not curtail faithfulness to the full-orbed proclamation of the Word which carries its own wisdom in spite of our desire to act as its editors and improvers.
The Holy Spirit is fully aware and competent in his ministry of the application of saving truth. We are ambassadors not authors, and have no right to tweak the import of our Sovereign's dispatches to mankind - rebels being granted a reprieve of sentence and the promise of redemption. Only admission of our offences and moral helplessness can cause us to worthily appreciate grace. Cheap grace abounds. The cross does not signify cheap grace but great grace which is welcomed by great sinners who need to know the dimensions of their miscreancy so that they will flee to Christ as the only remedy for ruined souls. People in the doctor's waiting room know that they have a problem and have come to their physician for healing. A cover-up may be fatal. Non-attendance may result in a funeral.
We have Articles ix and x to work through on the way to the glorious news of article xi - which means nothing without the knowledge of guilt and helplessness. The Biblical formula is pessimism with regard to man and optimism with reference to God. What a splendid transformation in outlook. As Luther has said, he found "the ladder to heaven", not a few steps upward in vain and futile human self-improvement and indulgence in mere religiosity. The Gospel is a life and death matter. God is not merely an adornment to life here to pretty things up in an ornamental sense. He is our only hope for blessing and the vision of himself for endless aeons. And so we do not shy away –even in an age of superficial sophistication and mockery of God - from the facts of original sin (the infection of evil) the enslaved will (bound to yield to our base affections and damaged reason with an inbred antipathy to God and righteousness) so that against this dark background the brilliance of the divine kindness stands out brighter than the blaze of the noonday sun.
Depravity must precede and emphasize the blessed relief of deliverance in human awareness. In our impotence we confide in the rescue operation of our God entirely and that is a foretaste of our heavenly Sabbath rest. End of works. Beginning of bliss. How indispensable and sweet our Saviour and big brother becomes. At hand in our helplessness and unworthiness and with us now forever - from wretchedness to wealth in the generosity of God. What harm can come from an accurate diagnosis of our spiritual condition and an appropriate administration of the divine remedy?
We must be bold in the enunciation of truth, tell it as it is, and what it can be in and because of Christ. Contamination and cleansing in the light of the moral demands of a holy God is a complete communication of the salvation wrought by God, and both elements contribute to the realization that the message we cherish and declare is imbued with divine kindness in our justification by grace reconciled by the accomplishment of the Redeemer. Lopsided teaching and preaching is ultimately loveless as well as erroneous, and in avoiding the fact of sin and lost-ness, craven and indulgent of carnal preference.
Our softness towards sin is evident in the omission of the opening sentences of the 1662 BCP in the revised liturgies. This leads to the erosion or elimination of the sense of need for repentance and the casualty is the loss of a strong sense of grace. We must cry to God in the words of the title of Richard Pape's wartime memoirs, "Boldness Be My Friend".
The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church
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