As predicted, false teachers are speaking out at the Anglican meeting of Lambeth XV this week.   The focus is on a resolution from 1998 (Lambeth I.10) that affirmed that marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that taught that homosexuality is incompatible with Scripture.   At this international conference, instead of ‘resolutions’ certain ‘calls’ are being given, and attending bishops are asked to state their level of affirmation.   One call addresses this 1998 understanding of sexuality and marriage—an understanding the Church has always held.   Yet some whole ‘provinces’ or regions in the world and some bishops and archbishops are emitting their own calls to reject this teaching and to affirm the Western culture’s sexual immorality and error regarding marriage over against the Bible’s clear teaching. [1]   The larger part of the Anglican Communion remains orthodox, but the Western provinces have fractured the Communion with their false teaching on sexuality and marriage.

  Words are often shorthand for weighty concepts, but therein lies a problem.   We think we know what someone means by the word, or even what a culture means by it.   Yet we find at some point that we do not.   This happens with virtues—weighty concepts indeed.   To one person, love means letting others make their own choices; to another, it means caring enough to intervene when someone is going to do something harmful.   The following reflection will look at the virtue ‘justice’ in regard to how it is understood in Job 29.11-17.   We have heard of the patience of Job, but what about the righteousness of Job?   At this point in the book of Job, Job is reflecting on his life at a time when he was a respected ruler in the city.   The specific passage explains how he ruled, and in it we get his understanding of justice: 11         When the ear heard, it called me blessed,                         and when the eye saw, it approved, 12         because I delivered the poor who cried

In the apostle Paul's day, one of the great philosophical discussions had to do with the role of nature and nurture in ethics.  Did people do what they do because of the way that they were by nature or because of how they were nurtured?  Relatedly, one could ask why people sometimes live 'against nature.'  In the culture of the first century, Jews, Christians, Cynics, and Stoics could all agree that one should live according to nature, which, for religious people, was also the way God made the world.  A related question in antiquity--one that requires too large an answer for this post--is, 'Are desires innate or developed in human beings?'  This question, too, occupied philosophers of old. The questions are still asked, sometimes in different ways with words like 'orientation' and 'identity' featuring.  Western culture has been at a peculiar cross-road of Modernity and Postmodernity over the past half century, and this has meant that older arguments

 The short answer to the question, 'Should Christians use someone's 'preferred pronouns' in compliance with 'transgender' politics?' is, 'Of course not.'  No realist should, for that matter.  Yet the issue is not simply one of realism, it is also a matter of truth-telling.  And, for those thinking that compliance with someone else's unnatural wishes is an expression of love, one can only hope that someone will love them enough to tell them the truth. Paul Huxley, the Communication Coordinator at Christian Concern , has written a very clear, short article addressing this issue.  It is entitled, 'Christians Should Not Be Compelled to Lie by Using Trans Pronouns' (15 July, 2022), available here .  It is an excellent statement on the issue.  The main purpose of this blog post is to suggest to readers that they read Huxley's arguments on the issue. In a cultural context that has elevated perception and choice above reality and nature, Chri

  Strange as it may seem, some have argued that churches decline because they do not bend to the culture.   However, e very mainline denomination in the USA, Great Britain, and Europe has been declining for decades—60 decades in the USA — while enthusiastically embracing the culture.   Every one of them has shifted from support for orthodox Christianity to blend in with, even advocate for, the increasingly post-Christian culture of the West.   This was true when the culture was Modernity, and it is true now that the culture is Postmodernity. During Modernity, Evangelical seminaries for the most part stood strong and in opposition to the culture and culture-affirming trends in the mainline denominations, such as scientifically based attacks on Biblical authority, sexual liberty, and abortion.   Evangelicals believed that Scripture was the infallible Word of God, upheld orthodox teaching about the deity of Christ, the meaning of the atonement, and justification by faith, and resisted t

  Government loans create two problems for the seminary.   This matter applies to American seminaries.   The government student loan programme is supposed to make education possible for students without the funds for study.   Its effect on education has been to increase the costs of an education well above the rate of inflation.   Seminaries have done what they can to keep education affordable, but with government loans as an option, they have allowed their costs to grow in comparable ways to other educational institutions.   That is, they have not solved their problem of the costs of an education as a Christian community should but as an academic institution does.   One result is that the graduates enter ministry with huge debts and, in America, they will already have accumulated educational debts from their undergraduate studies. A second problem with seminaries that offer student loans for their education is that they open themselves up to government regulations.   If an instituti

  To quote Stephen Neill, “If mission is everything, then mission is nothing. If everything that the Church does is to be classified as ‘mission,’ we shall have to find a term for the Church’s particular responsibility for ‘the heathen,’ those who have never yet heard the name of Christ.”   Something similar needs to be said about the seminary.   ‘If every job is a vocation, and the seminary trains for vocations, then the seminary is a place to study for any job.’   Yet, you may object, Christian counselling is not just any job, it’s a ministry.   And then we’d have to discuss what is meant by Christian counselling, who teaches it, and what the curriculum entails. And there are different answers to those questions.   If one means ‘pastoral counselling,’ then, by all means, gives some space in the seminary to this training.   If, however, one means by counselling a degree that is accredited by a secular accrediting agency and that teaches a curriculum for state licensure and certifica

This point is in no way meant to undermine the essential importance of academic merit.  The point rather has to do with raising academic proficiency above other essential commitments that a seminary must have.  The weaker a seminary's connection to a particular constituency, such as a denomination, the easier it is for those driving the seminary to turn to non-ecclesial, non-theological concerns in hiring faculty, shaping programmes, planning, etc.  One of the obvious emphases that emerges is justifying the hiring of a faculty member because of his or her academic strengths.  As there are plenty of would-be faculty running around with PhD degrees these days, 'academic merit' is usually a criterion that hides other interests of those pressing for a particular hiring of a faculty member.  In this era, in particular, agendas to move away from Biblical infallibility, the centrality of the Bible for theology and ministry, racial issues, feminist issues, 'diversity,' and

Seminaries with weak ties to their constituencies, that is, the denominations and organisations that oversee ministries, will lose their way soon enough.   This is especially the case when ‘Evangelicalism’ comes to be defined by independent churches and ministries more than by denominations with historical and ecclesial depth in particular, orthodox, theological tradition.  When the major part of a student body in a seminary declares non-affiliation with denominations, and when the seminary celebrates the great number of denominational affiliations it has on its faculty and in its student body, there is a vagueness about what ministry is, what convictions are to be affirmed, and who is interested in ‘purchasing’ the seminary’s ‘product’ (hiring graduates).  The seminary without strong links to a denomination or denominations and Christian organisations probably teaches toward the academic subjects, encourages any publication by its faculty rather than collaborates on what the Church ne