Anglican Unscripted Episode 224

Apr 15, 2016

Anglican Unscripted is the only video newscast in the Anglican Church. Each Episode Kevin, George, Allan and Peter bring you news and prospective from around the globe.
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How Legalism Has Destroyed the Communion -Stand Firm

What no one is saying . . .
This week, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), one of the four Anglican “Instruments of Communion,” is meeting in Lusaka, Zambia. In the life of a desperately compromised institution, it has been no surprise that the decision of the overwhelming number of Primates of the Anglican Communion has been ignored. The Episcopal Church (TEC) has not only led the rebellious charge to incorporate sexual practices that are proscribed by Scripture, but they (and a few other Anglican Provinces) also have gone a step further…they are blessing what God calls sin.

What is absolutely remarkable is the great absence of institutional voices to say that what TEC (and other similarly minded Provinces) is doing is wrong. It’s not really hard. W.R.O.N.G. Easy to say, but it isn’t being said.

Instead, the emphasis is on “positive” contributions from TEC and on apologizing to “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,Transgendered, ‘Questioning,’ and ‘Inquiring’” (LGBTQI) people. Most of the apologies center around asking for forgiveness for not fully incorporating those with leanings or behaviors of LEBTQI into the life (and leadership) of the Church.

We are constantly bombarded with people demanding that their lifestyle choices be affirmed and blessed. The problem is that things do not exist in a vacuum. There is a reason that God does not bless same-sex sexual intimacy. It is not because He arbitrarily sets boundaries and capriciously declares some things out of bounds. It is because same-sex sexual intimacy is fraught with problems. Anecdotal accounts suggest that the “typical” same-sex couple is two professors, perhaps in their sixties who have been faithfully living together for decades, reading Dostoyevsky and sipping sherry in the afternoon, occasionally stopping to discuss philosophy. In fact, same-sex relationships are tragically unstable. The last data I saw reported that fewer than 10% of same-sex relationships (i.e., the sexually active ones) are monogamous for even five years, with huge numbers of same-sex active people having 100 to even 500 partners in a life time.

Of course, the activists would claim that such instability is the fault of the judgment that same-sex active people experience. The problem lies, they say, with the hateful and homophobic rejection that such people experience, which destabilizes their relationships...

Church of Norway endorses gay marriage

Stott Bowdlerized
Recently I bought a copy of John Stott’s brief and famous exposition of the Christian gospel, Basic Christianity, which I intended to give to a friend. The book was first published in 1958 and has sold several million copies. It is at once simple and refined, gentle and uncompromising, and many people in the Anglophone world can trace their conversions to reading Stott’s little masterpiece. If any “spiritual classics” were published during the second half of the twentieth century, Basic Christianity surely is one.

The copy I bought is a fiftieth-anniversary reprint by Eerdmans and includes a new preface by Stott himself, who died in 2011. I read the preface mainly out of curiosity, not intending to read the book again, and this sentence caught my attention: “It was obviously necessary to update the language, not least by use of a modern translation of the Bible, and to respond to sensitivities relating to gender. We are grateful to Dr. David Stone for taking care of these sensitivities.”

 

The subject of gendered pronouns has of course become controversial in recent years. Although I myself take an old-school view on the question—“he,” “him,” and “his” for general antecedents, though occasionally “his or her” sounds appropriate to my ear—I was prepared to accept the need to alter Stott’s original text in order to avoid causing offense. The elderly Stott’s “not least” sounded worrisome, but how bad could it be?...