Saturday 8 December 2012

Why remain a Church of England Anglican?

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Given all my nasty (and well-deserved) criticisms of the Church of England, why am I a member?

1. I was baptized into into it, I attended a Church of England Primary School (although I was an atheist for all of my conscious life until a few years ago).

2. I always loved the language of the Book of Common Prayer and Authorized Version of the Bible - and since I became a Christian I have come to regard them as divinely inspired.

3. The architecture, music etc.

4. Great figures such as Thomas Traherne, Sam Johnson, C.S. Lewis...

OK, let's stop the list. The point is that I have an historical allegiance, as an Englishman - I feel comfortable and natural in the CoE; and its traditions, rituals, language etc are potent for me.

Obviously, I regard the historical Anglican church as a real, proper, catholic church, as sacramentally valid etc and as having had goodly numbers of extremely Godly people among its mostly secular orientated adherents. It has not hit the heights of saintliness of Eastern Orthodoxy, but there has been very great Holiness, and even now contains a few people of considerable spiritual stature.

Being who I am (English, lazy etc) and in my situation (geographical, social etc) the Church of England is probably the highest form of Christian life to which I could reasonably aspire.

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Yes, but but but - all that is problematized, critiqued, inverted, rejected by the modern Church of England.

And the modern Church of England has been infiltrated and subverted by Antichristian extreme Leftists.

The point is why do I remain?

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The reasons get fewer with every passing year, and change with the continuing decay and corruption around me.

What it boils down to is that I regard all the major Christian denominations (not just the C of E) as mostly-corrupt, with almost-wholly-corrupt secular Leftist leaderships.

Therefore I am not seeking perfection, I am not even seeking anything with long-term viability; so I look not for a denomination but for a specific church, a specific pastor and congregation.

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And so... I attend a large, alive, family-oriented, scripturally-faithful conservative evangelical Anglican church; and sometimes visit a few other more catholic Anglican churches, especially for Eucharist.

And this keeps me going, for now.

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But it is not an example applicable to others, and the solution is fragile and incomplete, and it is probably going to break down one way or another in months or years (due to continued deterioration in the C of E) - and then I will either move out of the C of E with this church (and presumably with other conservative evangelicals - maybe staying within the larger Anglican communion - indeed this is de facto pretty much the case already); or else I personally will have to move to another church (if I can find one - I have not yet been looking) and therefore, necessarily, to another denomination.

I think the most that can reasonably be hoped for under present conditions, and even this may not be available, is that there are a few individual congregations which a real Christian might join with reasonably safety - and these seem to be scattered across the denominations.

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While loyalty is natural, and natural is good (so far as it goes); loyalty may be a snare; and, especially in conditions of strategic Leftist subversion, loyalty to the history of an institution has often ended-up (in many situations, in most situations - not just the churches but schools, colleges, regiments, trades and professions, regions etc) as treachery to the core and original nature of that institution.

In this case, loyalty has led many well-motivated individuals to support the strategic destruction of Christianity in the Church of England and to use the CoE for this purpose in wider English society.

If such corruption continues to spread, for each real Christian individual there will come a point (fork in the road, a crisis) where loyalty and all the rest of it must be abandoned, or else one will oneself become part of the corruption: an agent of Antichrist, alongside the majority of current Church of England leaders and pastors.

All I can say is that I haven't, yet (I don't think) reached that point.  

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Note: By 'an agent of Antichrist' I mean something fairly specific and objectively definable: a person who serves the (demonic) agenda of subverting Christianity by means not of direct attack but by propagating a perversion of Christianity, by advocating a deceptive and evil simulation of partial aspects of Christianity, which is motivated by covert Anti-christian objectives (I mean, the 'bottom line' values of an agent of Antichrist are non-Christian). This is an exact description of mainstream liberal Christianity and its adherents, among others.

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

Sad, but true.

Ugh said...

"so I look not for a denomination but for a specific church, a specific pastor and congregation. And so... I attend a large, alive, family-oriented, scripturally-faithful conservative evangelical Anglican church"

Precisely: I was raised Roman Catholic, and I guess I always will be Catholic, but for now I attend a non-denominational, Christ-centered 'teaching' church where I have learned more about scripture and Jesus Christ in the last 8 months than I did in 50's attending Catholic mass.

My Catholic Church struggles to 150 people in the pews(in a city of 300,000)for it's one Mass on Sunday while the teaching church draws 2000+ for each of it's 3 services. Clearly there is a desire to explore scripture that isn't being met in the Catholic Church.

tgj said...

What is evil? It is looking at Lucifer and saying: "Well, he is almost as good as God." Then you do what he does, which is look at himself, and you think: "How could I change this God? And why would I want to?"

Anyway, the same thing is happening everywhere, including Orthodoxy. As long as you are still running, there is a chance that you will keep getting sick of the evil fast enough that you will keep recognizing it and rejecting it until you find the truth, which you can then keep running towards, faster and faster and faster. But when you start to say: "This is good enough for now," and "I can't be perfect," and generally get wise to the ways of the world, the problem is that you stop running and start jogging. Then walking. Then you settle down. And when the thuggees show up and start breaking the furniture, you are more likely to dig in than you are to start moving again, and you've forgotten how to run at all.

I see a lot of people in situations they don't like, and I wonder how far they will go before they move. But the longer they wait, the less likely it is that they will move, and the less likely it is they will move in a good direction if they are more or less forced into it.

Then, God willing, I snap out of it and check to see if I am still running, or whether I have slowed down to pass judgement on others. And inevitably I have stopped moving completely....

Bruce Charlton said...

@tgj - excellent points.

Of course, the truth is always a middle path, and there is equal hazard in become addicted to 'seeking' - for example moving again and again between preachers, churches and denominations, and never settling down to the hard work of living by a set of practices.

There is no formula since Satan is smarter than we are. Fortunately we know that sincere, humble effort is enough - that is what we must no be deceived about; we must not mistake complacency or sloth for humility before God.