Apostasy
The following are brief excerpts from a Time Magazine (July 17, 2006, pg. 6) interview with the Presiding-Bishop-Elect Katharine Jefferts Schori:
Q: What will be your focus as head of the US church?
A: Our focus needs to be on feeding people who go to bed hungry, on providing primary education to girls and boys, on healing people with AIDS, on addressing tuberculosis and malaria, on sustainable development. That ought to be the primary focus.
Q: Many Anglicans in the developing world say such choices [i.e., Bishop Robinson, et al] in the US church have hurt their work.
A: That's been important for the church here to hear [sic!]. We've heard in ways we hadn't heard before the problematic nature of our decisions. Especially in the places where Christians are functioning in the face of Islamic culture and mores, evangelism is a real challenge [i.e., they're killing them for being Xns in the first place, and the added difficulty of explaing that you're not THAT kind of Anglican just isn't helping things]. But these decisions were made because we believe that's where the Gospel has been calling us. The Episcopal Church in the US has come to a reasonable conclusion and consensus that gay and lesbian Christians are full members of this church and that our ministry to and with gay and lesbian Christians should be part of the fullness of our life.
Q: Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven?
A: We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.
Q: What is your prayer for the church today?
A: That we remember the centrality of our mission is to love each other. That means caring for our neighbors. And it does not mean bickering about fine points of doctrine.
[End--mercifully].
In God's providence, my best-friend Ben sent me the article from which I've supplied these apostate quotations several days ago, and I recevied it today in the mail, the very same day that Father Ben, my priest, sent me an article in First Things written by David B. Hart several years ago titled, "Christ and Nothing." In short, the thesis goes like this: either orthodox Christianity, or nihilism. I highly recommend reading the article, although it is, as you know if you've read Hart before, filled with words you don't know. The following are a few choice selections, chosen for their pugnacity on the one hand, and their relative verbal simplicty on the other:
"IT would be a willful and culpable blindness for us to refuse to recognize how aesthetically arid, culturally worthless, and spiritually depraved our society has become."
Hence, our orthodox response requires "self-abnegation, contrarianism, a willingness not only to welcome but to condemn, and a refusal of secularization as fierce as the refusal of our Christian ancestors to burn incense to the genius of the emporer."
Brothers and sisters, it's time to take up arms and pray for the heretics. May God have mercy on them. Amen.
Q: What will be your focus as head of the US church?
A: Our focus needs to be on feeding people who go to bed hungry, on providing primary education to girls and boys, on healing people with AIDS, on addressing tuberculosis and malaria, on sustainable development. That ought to be the primary focus.
Q: Many Anglicans in the developing world say such choices [i.e., Bishop Robinson, et al] in the US church have hurt their work.
A: That's been important for the church here to hear [sic!]. We've heard in ways we hadn't heard before the problematic nature of our decisions. Especially in the places where Christians are functioning in the face of Islamic culture and mores, evangelism is a real challenge [i.e., they're killing them for being Xns in the first place, and the added difficulty of explaing that you're not THAT kind of Anglican just isn't helping things]. But these decisions were made because we believe that's where the Gospel has been calling us. The Episcopal Church in the US has come to a reasonable conclusion and consensus that gay and lesbian Christians are full members of this church and that our ministry to and with gay and lesbian Christians should be part of the fullness of our life.
Q: Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven?
A: We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.
Q: What is your prayer for the church today?
A: That we remember the centrality of our mission is to love each other. That means caring for our neighbors. And it does not mean bickering about fine points of doctrine.
[End--mercifully].
In God's providence, my best-friend Ben sent me the article from which I've supplied these apostate quotations several days ago, and I recevied it today in the mail, the very same day that Father Ben, my priest, sent me an article in First Things written by David B. Hart several years ago titled, "Christ and Nothing." In short, the thesis goes like this: either orthodox Christianity, or nihilism. I highly recommend reading the article, although it is, as you know if you've read Hart before, filled with words you don't know. The following are a few choice selections, chosen for their pugnacity on the one hand, and their relative verbal simplicty on the other:
"IT would be a willful and culpable blindness for us to refuse to recognize how aesthetically arid, culturally worthless, and spiritually depraved our society has become."
Hence, our orthodox response requires "self-abnegation, contrarianism, a willingness not only to welcome but to condemn, and a refusal of secularization as fierce as the refusal of our Christian ancestors to burn incense to the genius of the emporer."
Brothers and sisters, it's time to take up arms and pray for the heretics. May God have mercy on them. Amen.
posted by Anonymous at 3:29 PM
1 Comments:
I don't know if I really want to pander to phil's rants (bless you brother for picking me up at the airport), but this juxtaposition at Get Religion between Schori and Akinola continues to hammer his point, too bad your a donatist, misogynist, (what are the other pejoratives people throw at African church plants?)
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