[T]he policy of Elizabeth I and Archbishop Whitgift was neither wise nor true, as the words of so weighty an authority as the late Bishop Creighton amply testify. Speaking of the late Elizabethan Church, the Bishop says –”It tended to lose the appearance of a free and self-governing body, and seemed to be an instrument of the policy of the State. Its pleadings and its arguments lost half their weight because they were backed by coercive authority. The dangerous formula ‘Obey the law’ was introduced into the settlement of questions which concerned the relations of the individual conscience and God.”
It is only common fairness to say that a great deal of the Nonconformity and Dissent of the past two hundred and fifty years has been no fault of their own, and was for the most part excusable and unavoidable. Our truer attitude would be to follow the advice of Bishop Stubbs when he says –”The initial question is, How and why are they Nonconformists, how and why are they competing communities? The answer, Simply because they, as communities, hold some points so important as to outweigh the advantages of communion with the Church.”
We shall do well to inform ourselves on the points which Nonconformists consider essential to their position, for there is no better way of arriving at a true conclusion than by endeavoring to understand the opinions of those who differ from us.
We must also bear in mind that a ministry may be historically irregular without being spiritually invalid... when we remember how much of Nonconformity is due to past failures of our Church, we shall be wronging the deepest principles of Christianity if we refuse to admit the spiritual validity, efficacy and blessing of their ministrations. We owe to Nonconformity some of our choicest saints and profoundest theologians, and no one who realizes what the Spirit of Christ is can doubt for an instant the spiritual power and blessing to be found in the Nonconformist Churches:
…the insistence on definite personal relation to God, as urged by the Baptists, the fervour of the Methodists, and the love of the Word of God and earnest expectation of the Lord’s Coming, which characterize the Plymouth Brethren.
The whole truth is not with one side alone. No one can doubt the present divisions of Christendom are a stumbling-block to non-Christians, and no one who reads the New Testament teaching on unity can help deploring the tendency to continual division and separation among certain sections of the Protestant world. Sectarianism has been well defined as individualism run mad, and it would be well for Nonconformity if it could realize more than it does of the corporate side of Christianity and the Christian life.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Beating the Bounds
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Are the divisions of Christendom still a stumbling block for non-Christians? The modern spiritual shopper might like the variety. The danger that someone will get hurt by a bad apple would be there even in a store with less variety.
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ReplyDeleteWe are generally in a post-Christian era in the Western 1st world. Having lived "individualism run mad" I appreciate being in a reformed catholic communion that holds diversity of opinion in unity. Diversity, that is, on matters such as eschatology, sign gifts, lay ministry, and the like -- not the fundamentals of faith and morality. Those parts that have departed from the latter are slowly and carefully being excised from the communion, as recent letters from the Global South demonstrate.
ReplyDeleteThe main thing I take from GT here is his humility regarding the Church of England's failures, and its responsibility in creating circumstances that necessitated nonconformity and dissent. That many parts of the worldwide Anglican communion are now embracing the "spiritual validity, efficacy and blessing of [nonconformity's] ministrations" I find very encouraging.
Posctcript: for the benefit of other readers, I use the word "catholic" to denote universal. It is not a reference to the Roman Catholic Church and its subsidiaries. The Anglican communion to which I refer here is predominately reformed, evangelical (stressing personal faith and the supremacy of Scripture), catholic (i.e., universal, embracing an order and tradition that cross cultural boundaries), and apostolic insofar as it adheres to the teachings of the Lord's apostles laid out in Scripture.
ReplyDeleteWhen Griffith Thomas left England for Canada and then the U.S. he found the Anglican and Episcopal churches on this continent "high and dry" (his words), i.e. lacking biblical and evangelistic zeal while stuck in formalism. Toward the end of his life he spent more time with fellow evangelicals from other denominations, including Lewis Sperry Chafer, a Presbyterian, with whom he co-founded Dallas Theological Seminary -- a non-denominational, evangelical school. Were GT alive today, we would be delighted to see the evangelical and biblical fervor present in the Anglican churches of the "Global South" which account for the vast majority of the world's Anglican Christians.