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A Defense of the Doctrine of the Eternal Subordination of the Son  (Yes, this is about women's ordination.)

Essays on the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood from the Episcopal Diocese of Ft. Worth

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"Fasten Your Seatbelts: Can a Woman Celebrate Holy Communion as a Priest? (Video), Fr. William Mouser

Father is Head at the Table: Male Eucharistic Headship and Primary Spiritual Leadership, Ray Sutton

FIFNA Bishops Stand Firm Against Ordination of Women

God, Gender and the Pastoral Office, S.M. Hutchens

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Homo Hierarchicus and Ecclesial Order, Brian Horne

How Has Modernity Shifted the Women's Ordination Debate? , Alistair Roberts

Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination, Robert Yarbrough (Book Review, contra Will Witt)

Icons of Christ: Plausibility Structures, Matthew Colvin (Book Review, contra Will Witt)

Imago Dei, Persona Christi, Alexander Wilgus

Liturgy and Interchangeable Sexes, Peter J. Leithart

Ordaining Women as Deacons: A Reappraisal of the Anglican Mission in America's Policy, John Rodgers

Ordination and Embodiment, Mark Perkins (contra Will Witt)

Ordinatio femina delenda est. Why Women’s Ordination is the Canary in the Coal Mine, Richard Reeb III

Priestesses in Plano, Robert Hart

Priestesses in the Church?, C.S. Lewis

Priesthood and Masculinity, Stephen DeYoung

Reasons for Questioning Women’s Ordination in the Light of Scripture, Rodney Whitacre

Sacramental Representation and the Created Order, Blake Johnson

Ten Objections to Women Priests, Alice Linsley

The Short Answer, S.M. Hutchens

William Witt's Articles on Women's Ordination (Old Jamestown Church archive)

Women in Holy Orders: A Response, Anglican Diocese of the Living Word

Women Priests?, Eric Mascall

Women Priests: History & Theology, Patrick Reardon

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Entries in Church v. Academy (9)

Thursday
Sep262019

The Anglican Pastor Blog and Women's Ordination

An Anglican Pastor blog article published today, If Women Can Be Saved, Then Women Can Be Priests, is representative of why I removed this blog from my list of reputable Anglican online sources. "If women can be saved, then women can be priests." Talk about a whopping non sequitur of an article title, and when you dig into the content of the article you'll encounter a shameful piece of theological legerdemain as well. Her argument only mimicks that of the small but vocal nest of feminists I encountered when I was in the Orthodox Church. The fact of the matter is that there is zero, zilch, nada support in the Fathers for women's ordination. It's why they never ordained one.

The article is written by one Emily McGowin, a deacon in the oddly-named "Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others", one of the virtual dioceses of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).  Her bio there, as elsewhere around the Web, reports that she "is a teacher and scholar of religious studies and a theologian in the Anglican tradition."

Well, first of all, the "Anglican tradition" knows nothing of the ordination of women to the ranks of clergy, deacon, priest or bishop.  The ordination of women in Anglican churches is a late uncatholic monstrosity, dating back only to the 1970s. 

The blog's founder, Fr. Greg Goebel, is apparently pro-WO, though this disclaimer is given at the head of the article:

Editor’s Note: Anglican Pastor does not take a site-wide position on women’s ordination. We do, however, require both clarity and charity. The piece below meets our standards. We ask that your responses to it do so as well.

The fact, however, that Anglian Pastor has chosen to give her a forum is damning enough. It doesn't matter that he allegedly allows opposing views.  If you put some uncatholic thing out there as something to be seriously considered, your disclaimer is meaningless from a Catholic point of view, and Anglicans claim to be Catholic, something that is evident not only from Anglicanism's theological history but also from the fact that Anglicans pledge this when they recite the Creed every Sunday: "I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church."  The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church does not ordain women and never will.  The issue simply is not up for discussion, the protestations of Neo-Anglicans notwithstanding.

With respect to their protestations, Mrs. McGowin's Neo-Anglican view is representative of the theologically and ecclesially troubled movement known as Protestantism.  One of the pathologies of the Protestant Reformation is that it eventually came to embrace pluralistic theologies, quite in accordance with its principle that well-meaning scholars could arrive at differing stances in their quest to discover "new light breaking forth from Scripture" and hence could posit new understandings that should be classed as adiaphora. The Protestant theological academy thus supplanted the authority of the Fathers and the Church's bishops.  That this is so is evidenced in the article, where the author cites the pro-WO ACNA theologian Will Witt, who warmly speaks of "PhD Anglicanism".

However, as Newman remarked, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." There is nothing truly traditionally Anglican or Catholic in this article.  Those who are interested in becoming authentically Anglican should steer clear of Realignment Neo-Anglicanism, and should look to Continuing Anglicanism instead, where the Catholic faith is held and where, accordingly, we recite the Creed with integrity.

Monday
Jul112016

William Witt Responds

Here.  His comment is quoted here in full.  My reply follows:

Deacon Little,

I actually do visit your blog from time to time. It does seem that I am your favorite example of everything that is wrong with the ACNA, and that's fine with me. I do find myself frustrated with your tendency to pin me on a board like the proverbial butterfly to which you've nicely attached a "label."

I did write that I was a "Reformation Christian," but I would never have added the adjective "mere"or say that we are under no obligation to "prayerfully consider" the admonitions of Rome, Orthodoxy, and Anglicans who consider Anglicanism a branch of the Catholic Church -- although with Michael Ramsey I consider the "three branch theory" to be a kind of trumphalist apology for schism. (Ramsey also came to affirm women's ordination.)

My understanding of what it means for Anglicanism to be a "Reformation" Church can be found here:

http://willgwitt.org/anglicanism/evangelical-or-catholic/

"Reformation Anglicanism thus saw itself as in continuity with the Catholic Church, and a reforming movement in the Catholic Church, but certainly not as rejection of genuine Catholicism."

"If I were asked to identify my churchmanship, I would call myself a “catholic evangelical” or a “Reforming Catholic,” in the tradition of movements like the Mercersburg Theology, Jenson and Braaten’s Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, or figures like Thomas F. Torrance. If I am an Evangelical, I am an ecumenical Evangelical, who understands the Reformation as a reforming movement in the Western Catholic Church. If am an Anglo-Catholic, I am a post-Vatican II Anglican catholic, who understands catholicism as ressourcement, not as retrenchment. If asked to choose between an evangelical and a catholic understanding of the Reformation, I would refuse that choice as a false dilemma."

And here:

http://willgwitt.org/what_is_anglican_theology/

"I would suggest that Anglican theology can be understood as “Reformed Catholicism” or “Catholic Evangelicalism.”

Even on the issue of women's ordination, where I know you find my views not simply mistaken, but heretical, I affirm my position because I I am convinced a case can be made on theological grounds that are not only Evangelical, but also Catholic.

Grace and Peace,
William G. Witt

Greetings, Dr. Witt, and thanks for the opportunity to address your points in this new post.

First, there is no need for you to take what I write so about your beliefs so seriously, for in fact I do not view you as the key “example of everything that is wrong with the ACNA.”  Yes, because of your visibility and influence in the ACNA I do highlight what I believe to be the error of your spirited and much-quoted defense of women’s ordination, but be assured that I am not singling you out personally.  You are but one of many voices clamoring for retention of the unfortunate innovation, and it is that phenomenon – the widespread support for this unbiblical and uncatholic practice found not only in the ACNA but the wider Anglican Communion – that continues to draw the ire of those of us on the side of apostolic and Catholic tradition. 

Moreover, I don’t believe that the practice of women’s ordination itself constitutes “everything that is wrong with the ACNA”.  There are other issues that stick in my craw about the Realignment and “orthodox” provinces in the Communion:  the inability of many of their clergy (especially millennials) to think systematically and historically about theology and politics; their influential “three-streams” orientation, which I have come to believe is both incoherent and un-Anglican; their willingness to abide un-Anglican practices in the Evangelical wing such as lay presidency at the Eucharist and the rejection of infant baptism; the rampant charismania/liturgical bacchanalia, and the unfortunate phenomenon, noted by such prominent Anglicans as Canon Arthur Middleton and Martin Thornton, of the “divorce between scholarship and pastoral practice from which Anglicanism still suffers” (Thornton, English Spirituality), that is, an inordinate emphasis on “Ph.D Anglicanism.”

It is true that you did not use the adjective “mere” when you spoke of “Reformation Christians,”, but let’s take a look at what you actually did say:

The long and short of it is, I am highly in favor of ecumenism (with Rome and Orthodoxy). At the same time, I think that the only proper way for ecumenical relations to move forward is that those of us who are Reformation Christians need to recognize that there are reasons that we are not Roman Catholics or Orthodox, and that progress can only take place if ecumenical discussion is a two-way street.

Now, when you say that being “Reformation Christians” means that” there are reasons “we are not Roman Catholics or Orthodox”, that is an implicit approval of not being in communion with them, notwithstanding your being “in favor of ecumenism”.  I think that is a very unfortunate, uncatholic, and let me add – dangerous – implication to make.  Anglican relations with the Orthodox were so good at the beginning of the 20th century that, had it not been for the Anglican Communion’s radical embrace of women’s ordination, which of course was rooted in deeper theological pathology, it may well have been in communion with the Orthodox by now.

What’s more, you Evangelical Anglicans aren’t the only “Reformation Christians” around.  Reformation principles, as variously understood and implemented by the “Reformation Christians” who embrace them, has led to all manner of deviation from Catholic faith and practice, both “conservative” and radical.  The problem with “Reformation Christianity”, as amply proved by its history, is that its principles provide no real anchor.  Throw Enlightenment ideologies into the mix and “Reformation Christianity” becomes even more unstable.  And that’s precisely what we have in Anglicanism, both in its liberal and “conservative” varieties.  At the end of the day, departure from Catholic faith and practice is the result of rebellion (the liberal variety) or rebellion masked as reform (the “conservative” variety).  In point of fact, while "Reformation Anglicanism (and later Anglican divinity – EP). . . saw itself as in continuity with the Catholic Church", its Reformational, and later, radical, principles put it on a trajectory away from continuity with the Catholic Church.  The embrace of women’s ordination in the Anglican Communion is a key example, but by no means the only one.  As I strenuously argue here at OJC and elsewhere, modern Anglicans need to come to grips with whether or not they truly do adhere to the classical Anglican belief that the Church of England and her progeny constitute nothing less than the Catholic Church and that what that communion of churches believes is the faith of the apostles and Church Fathers.  There is only one way to be "in continuity with the Catholic Church," and that is, in fact, to be in continuity with it, especially with respect to an issue that has such deep and profound triadological and christological connections.  And as Canon Middleton argues, we can't find continuity with it on our own terms.  We have to find it in terms with our proven conformity, in faith and practice, to the mind of the Fathers.

It’s clear that you are “convinced a case (for WO) can be made on theological grounds that are not only Evangelical, but also Catholic.”  But Rome, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and traditional Anglicanism – in short, the vast majority of Catholic Christianity - is not convinced of your claim to catholicity, just as many Evangelical Protestants are not convinced by your case on biblical and Protestant theological grounds.  Your case has been examined and answered by both Evangelical and Catholic theologians.  There is really nothing to do now except go our respective ways, your side unwilling to let go of your innovation and my side defending apostolic and Catholic faith and practice, which is why I believe ACNA will eventually fracture over this issue.

Or if it doesn't, it should.

Pax,

Embryo Parson

Monday
Jun132016

ACNA and the Anglican Disease

I was talking with a friend the other day who is currently serving in an ACNA mission but who comes from the APA.  His remark about ACNA was interesting.  He noted that there is a huge segment of people in that province who, if it had not been for the consecration of Vicky Gene Robinison,  would have happily remained Episcopalians.  Their move out of TEc to ACNA, in his estimation, wasn't so much evidence of their being traditional Anglicans as it was of their being mere anti-gay bigots (his words).  He went on to say that these peeople really have no clue as to what it means to be a traditional Anglican, or as to just what had happened to the Church of England and her spawn throughout the globe long, long before Robinson's consecration.

I've alluded here at OJC to what my friend is talking about, calling it the "Anglican Disease."  What happened to Anglicanism, I maintain, is that both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment worked in tandem to cut the CofE and her daughters loose from the Catholic faith, the former doing so by its preference for the academy over Catholic authority to settle theological questions, the latter doing so by its radical questioning of all traditional authority - which took place, again, mainly in Anglican academies.  In this day and age even purported conservative Anglican theologians are not immune to the disease.  Witness, for example, ACNA theologian William Witt's reference to "Ph.D Anglicanism" and "Reformation Christians" in his defense of the uncatholic monstrosity of women's ordination.  Dr. Witt and too many like him in ACNA are examples of the phenomenon my friend was talking about.  These people believe themselves to be conservative Anglicans, when nothing could be further from the truth.   They are to Anglicanism what neo-conservativism is to the GOP.  One perceptive writer at Touchstone calls them "latcons."

Thursday
Oct292015

Three Articles for the "Church v. Academy" Category

Monday
Jul202015

"PhD Anglicanism" and the Anglican Disease

As some readers may have noticed,  on Friday evening I took down an article I posted entitled “Anatomy of an Unfriending” regarding a spat I had with Trinity School for Ministry theology professor William Witt over a comment I made on his Facebook page, to wit, that women's ordination to the priesthood is an "uncatholic monstrosity".  I came to the conclusion that my comment, which concerned the role that Anglican “academic theologians” (Witt’s term) played in foisting women’s ordination on Anglican churches and how this only further complicated the problem of Anglican identity, was over the top rhetorically.  I privately apologized to Dr. Witt for the tone of my remark and took down my blog post.  After explaining to me privately and at his Facebook page his distaste for online theological debate, he subsequently re-friended me.  

As I explained to Dr. Witt, however, while I felt I must apologize for the sarcastic tone of my remark, I cannot and never will apologize for its content.   Implicit in that qualification is my belief that Witt and other “conservative” Anglican theologians who defend women’s ordination are guilty not only of muddying further the question of Anglican identity but of departing from Catholic faith and practice.  Anglicans claim to be Catholics, “Reformed” Catholics, yes, but Catholic enough to desire communion with or at least acknowledgment from Rome and Orthodoxy as a “branch” of the Catholic Church, analogous in certain respects to the Old Catholics, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the various provinces of Eastern Orthodox miscellany. 

Well, let me revise that a bit.  That has been the stated desire of many classical Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics for a long time.  There is another version of Anglicanism, however, that has been throwing caution – along with Catholic faith and practice - to the wind for quite some time.  I’m speaking, of course, of the liberal Protestant party in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, which was first hatched in the backwaters of infidelity that came to be associated with “Oxbridge” learning and later in other Western academies.  In the early 20th century, Orthodox-Anglican relations were so good that a number of major Orthodox jurisdictions had affirmed the validity of Anglican orders and certain of them gave economic sanction to Orthodox believers receiving Holy Communion from Anglican priests if an Orthodox priest was not available.  That dialogue imploded when the Church of England, the Protestant Episcopal Church USA, and other provinces in the Anglican Communion began ordaining women.  This in spite of ample warning from Orthodox notables such as Fr. Alexander Schmemann.  

When the churches of the Anglican Realignment, many of which were rightly termed “neo-Anglican” because of the several ways in which they departed from classical Anglicanism, began forming at the turn of the millennium, a number of Evangelical Anglican theologians and clergymen (and women) brought the deal-killing theology and practice of women’s ordination with them into the Realignment, though the theology was tweaked in an attempt to baptize it as a “conservative ” construct.  These folks relied in no small part on the exegetical and theological work of Evangelicals such as Gilbert Bilizekian, Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen, Millard Erickson, and Doug and Rebecca Groothuis.  A number of them are affiliated with  Christians for Biblical Equality, an organization dedicated to egalitarian hermeneutics (and thus women’s ordination). 

Dr. Witt is a prominent defender of women’s ordination to the priesthood in the Anglican Realignment.    Judging by a comment he made in the aforementioned Facebook discussion, he also gives "PhD Anglicanism" very high marks:

Perhaps this just reflects the difference between PhD Anglicanism and the home-grown variety. . . . I sometimes get the feeling that people I encounter on Facebook are still fighting battles that have long been forgotten about in academic theology.

It was that drippingly condescending remark that prompted my sarcastic comment about “academic theology” and it’s relationship to the “uncatholic monstrosity” of women’s ordination, but let’s overlook its condescending tone and focus rather on its substance.  What Dr. Witt is saying here, in essence, is that what ultimately matters for the church is what takes place in the rarified realm of the theological academy, that is to say, in the crania of the brahmins of “PhD Anglicanism.”  That, my friends, has historically been, as it is now in our time,  the heart of what I will call the “Anglican Disease”.

The Anglican Disease, as I mentioned previously, was incubated in the great centers of learning associated with the Church of England.  The Disease later spread to other Anglican centers of higher learning in the West.  It began in the 17th and 18th centuries when Anglican academic theologians began flirting with Enlightenment philosophies, theological and political, and later with the theories of higher criticism and other destructive theories associated with the rise of liberal Protestantism, and then finally with the kind of theological radicalism we see throughout the Anglican Communion in the Northern hemisphere and Oceania today. (For an excellent presentation on how Anglican Latitudinarianism morphed very naturally into Anglican radicalism, see Aidan Nichols’ The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism.  I give a brief review here.)

The Anglican Disease’s main symptom is seen in the proposition that the Anglican academe knows better than the historic and contemporary college of Catholic bishops about what’s good for the Church.  That is a complete reversal of the ecclesiology of the past, to which classical Anglicanism is supposed to hold, which is that it is the consensus of a group of Catholic bishops known as the “Church Fathers” and certain councils of bishops, primarily those deemed “Ecumenical”, that determine what is good for the Church, not the late untethered-from-orthodoxy invention known as the “theological academy".  That the Anglican Disease has taken a heavy toll on the Anglican Communion is evident.  Many Anglicans have concluded that it is better to leave the diseased body and start afresh with new, undiseased bodies that are dedicated once again to the apostolic and Catholic faith expressed in the Creed, the teachings of the Church Fathers.

Alas, we still find evidence of the Anglican Disease even in some of these new bodies: “Perhaps this just reflects the difference between PhD Anglicanism and the home-grown variety. . . .  I sometimes get the feeling that people I encounter on Facebook are still fighting battles that have long been forgotten about in academic theology.”  Being a “conservative” is no guarantee that one is immune to the Disease.  It is entirely possible for "conservatives" to depart from the Faith.  This is one reason I’m so thrilled about the existence The Center for Pastor Theologians.   Their idea is to return the task of theologizing to pastors, an idea that is consonant with the way the Catholic Church did theology up until modern times.  Not to say that the there is no role whatsoever for the academic theologian, or that obscurantism should be the order of the day, but rather that the goal of theology for orthodox believers is to foster the well-being of the Church, not the reputations and careers of academic theologians, whose “learned” views are all too often out of accord with the faith and practice of the Catholic Church.  Exhibit A: the “conservative” exegetical and theological case for women’s ordination to the priesthood.

I can think of no better example than the support of William Witt and other Anglican academic theologians for this uncatholic monstrosity.  Dr. Witt recently preached a sermon at a service where two of his students, a married couple, were both ordained to the diaconate.  The couple "will be ordained as priests"  in the near future.  In the course of his  sermon Witt remarked, "I do not have time to give an entire lecture on the theology of ordination. . . ."

Indeed, because for Anglican "latcon" proponents of women's ordination to the priesthood the development of that particular "theology of ordination" has proved to be yeomen's work, as I explained to a defender of Witt's pro-WO stance here:

His (Witt's) is a tall order. Nary a word in the Bible in support of WO, and 2,000 years of tradition and the changeless stances of Rome and Orthodoxy to overcome, but by golly let's change Catholic order by employing an argument that just so happens to have originated in the Anglican church about the time feminism began making inroads. He certainly deserves an "A" for effort.

Sorry, Dr. Witt, but an "uncatholic monstrosity" is what it is at the end of the day.  It is the practice of women’s ordination in the Anglican Communion, and now in the Anglican Realignment, that has in essence shut down ecumenical relations with the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Churches of the East.  These, our Catholic brothers and sisters with whom we say we desire communion, believe as I do that women’s ordination is in fact a monstrous departure from Catholic faith and order.  So do most classical Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics in ACNA, AMiA, and the Continuing Churches, and that’s why at the recent International Catholic Congress of Anglicans in Fort Worth a strong message was delivered in certain statements to all the “academic theologians” and non-theologians in ACNA who support women’s ordination.  If these statements are any indication, Witt and those desirous of maintaining Realignment Anglican unity can't be too happy, because the statements not only reflect EXACTLY what I've been saying to him and other defenders of WO in ACNA for some time now about how the practice of women’s ordination is viewed by many orthodox Anglicans, but the logic of those statements could also imply a separation down the road.  Say, when the ACNA Task Force on Holy Orders issues its final report, perhaps as soon as this January.  You would think that Dr. Witt, whose sentiments expressed in this Facebook discussion express the hope for keeping us all together, wouldn't be so dead set on alienating classical Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics.  But maybe it’s that in the final analysis neither Dr. Witt nor all the other supporters of “biblical equality” in ACNA care about Catholic order.  (See also An Exchange Between William Witt and Me on Women's Ordination.)

Sunday
Mar292015

Luther on Academic Theologians

To be read in conjuction with this.

"...the longer you write and teach the less you will be pleased with yourself. When you have reached this point, then do not be afraid to hope that you have begun to become a real theologian, who can teach not only the young and imperfect Christians, but also the maturing and perfect ones. For indeed, Christ’s church has all kinds of Christians in it who are young, old, weak, sick, healthy, strong, energetic, lazy, simple, wise, etc. If, however, you feel and are inclined to think you have made it, flattering yourself with your own little books, teaching, or writing, because you have done it beautifully and preached excellently; if you are highly pleased when someone praises you in the presence of others; if you perhaps look for praise, and would sulk or quit what you are doing if you did not get it -- if you are of that stripe, dear friend, then take yourself by the ears, and if you do this in the right way you will find a beautiful pair of big, long, shaggy donkey ears. Then do not spare any expense! Decorate them with golden bells, so that people will be able to hear you wherever you go, point their fingers at you, and say, “See, See! There goes that clever beast, who can write such exquisite books and preach so remarkably well.”
From Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings (LW 34:285-88).
Friday
Aug292014

The Center for Pastor Theologians

What has the Academy to do with the Church? - Tertullian of Carthage

There is no such thing as a conservative academic, because the academy today only accepts liberals who have been trained as such. It is impossible to study conservative theology at a post graduate level. Many people would disagree pointing to those with Masters Degrees, but those are just three year post-graduate courses where the first degree is not theology. I am talking about is the English system where you do your first degree in theology, then do post graduate work, again in theology. There are no universities who accept conservative Professors.

The student at such a faculty will be taught all about source criticism etc. of course using only the NA critical text, and studying only modernist "theologians". To be accredited a university must toe the line, or they are out.

This is a comment that Rev. Roger du Barry made to a recent blog article I posted entitled, "Lent and the Academic Theologian."  I posted this article and a previous related one under a new category I've created called "Church v. Academy", because I have become increasingly aware of a threat that a certain kind of academicism poses to Anglicanism, and in fact has been doing so since shortly after the Reformation.  It's common knowledge that universities in Christendom were created largely, though not solely, for the purpose of training ministers.  It's also common knowledge that these universities and divinity schools, from Oxford to Princeton to Georgetown University, have tended to liberalize, and later to radicalize.  For certain reasons, one of which is the laudable goal of intellectual freedom, the Church could simply not keep them orthodox.

This means one of two things.  Either the laudable and necessary goal of intellectual freedom inherently leads one away from orthodoxy, and therefore orthodoxy must be dispensed with, or there is some sinful, fallen dynamic (or set of dynamics, usually revolving around egoism and pride) that naturally attends intellectual freedom and therefore must be identified and remedied by orthodoxy.

I mentioned a specific threat to Anglicanism.  It was in the Church of England's universities that Pelagianism and Semipelagianism reared their heads in the Middle Ages, that Arminianism arose to challenge Edwardine and Elizabethan divinity around the turn of the 17th century, and that Deism and liberal Protestantism, both based in Enlightenment thought, arose later. 

The problem, as I see it, isn't limited to the way the academic environment nourishes the heresies and unbelief typically associated with liberalism.  "Conservative" academic types get caught up in the dynamic as well, as Rev. du Barry correctly implies.  I've recently rubbed shoulders on Facebook with two somewhat unpleasant ACNA priests, whose comments show how smitten they are by the academy and whose pastoral sensibilites are, in my estimation, suffering accordingly.  One of them thinks that it's simply a matter of time before Tom Wright's work on the New Perspective on Paul becomes orthodoxy for Anglicans, and looks down with elitist disdain on Wright's critics.   The other priest, an Anglo-Catholic who eschews the Articles of Religion, predictably wants to vest orthodoxy in councils of bishops, but bishops whose ears are keenly attuned to the scholarship produced by Anglican academics, which is to say, an alliance of Anglican bishops and scholars that would be much like Rome's Magisterium. 

Enter the Center for Pastor Theologians (CPT), an organization dedicated to addressing this "disconnect that exists between the academy and the local church", per its founder Gerald Hiestand.  I would love to see Anglicans get on board with this project, because for far too long too many Anglicans have been laboring under "the assumption that Christianity can be abstracted from the Church", to quote Orestes Brownson's criticism of Newman's flawed method.  Prior to the rise of the medieval university, education had been procured at cathedral or monastic schools, and prior to the Reformation, theologians were generally either pastors or had some vital connection to the Church (e.g., the religious).  After the Reformation, the Church in the West looked increasingly to the university scholar, and not the pastor/theologian, for guidance into all truth.  I would argue that the legacy of that has patently been a sad one.  Theology must spring from where the Holy Spirit is, and I would argue for a number of reasons that the Holy Spirit ain't in the secular academy, and is becoming increasingly unimportant in the Christian academy.  Hence the need to train orthodox, Spirit-led pastors as theologians, just as in the days of the Fathers, who relied principally on the theology of the apostles, whose theology was likewise crafted in the context of pastoral activity.  Though the charge will be lodged that CPT's project is "obscurantist" or "anti-intellectual", we must answer, "Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn" to those who register that concern.  One need only examine the trajectory of the academy in the Western world to see that obscurantism and anti-intellectualism increasingly marks that environment as well, not to mention all the other signs of moral and intellectual degradation. 

I've linked the CPT and related sites in the sidebar.

Sunday
Jun292014

Lent and the Academic Theologian

Thursday
Jun262014

I Wish I Had Read This Book as a Young Seminarian

A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.  Please see the editorial and customer reviews to get a sense of what Thielicke was trying to communicate to men being groomed for ministry.  Though I wasn't being groomed for the ministry back in the early 80s, I developed exactly the same kind of mindset the author warns against.  Thank God the church was protected back then from the likes of me, and thank Him as well that both the years and the school of hard knocks have instilled in me a different mind.  Now, at age 60, I am finally fitted for ministry.  Or so that's what I think I've discerned, anyway.  The church has to discern it as well.

Throughout the years I have encountered a number of young theology students who either lost sight of what theology was supposed to be about or had never gained it in the first place.  Unfortunately, some of them have become pastors.  I pray they won't end up doing too much damage to themselves, their flocks and/or to the wider church, and that as they mature in their ministry they will develop better minds, being of course not a reference to what they know or their intellectual horsepower, but how they employ their knowledge pastorally. 

Anyway, I found a great review of Thielicke's book, which I am compelled to republish in its entirety.  It's from a Presbyterian blog called Ordained Servants Online, and if this article in any indication of the blog's spirit, the blogger has ordained servanthood down:

A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

Gregory E. Reynolds

When I think back on my brashness as a young theologian, I shudder; and whenever that same brashness rears its ugly head today, I shudder still; but age and Christian experience have at least taught me to recognize this monster within.

Very early in my Christian life, while still considering a call to the ministry, I came across a little booklet first published in 1962 by Eerdmans entitled A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.[1] I recognized the author, Helmut Thielicke (1908–86), from my reading of his Encounter with Spurgeon[2] in Bible school in 1972. I have exercised myself with this sage booklet at least once a decade ever since, and never without profit, since the demon of pride is ever in need of being exorcised.

While avoiding the dangerous dichotomy of setting the Christian life over against doctrine, Thielicke doesn't confuse the two by eliding doctrine into life. One without the other is a sign of spiritual illness. Thus, he addresses his seminary students like a wise father:

You can see that the young theologian has by no means grown up to these doctrines in his own spiritual development, even if he understands intellectually rather well the logic of the system ... There is a hiatus between the arena of the young theologian's actual spiritual growth and what he already knows intellectually about this arena.[3]

Thielicke goes on to liken early theological training to puberty, during which it is as unwise to unleash the novice on the church as a preacher, as it would be to let the young singer sing while his voice is changing.[4]

Furthermore, time spent in the lofty realms of truth makes the novice susceptible to the "psychology of the possessor," in which love is sadly absent. "Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession."[5] "But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself." But when "truth is a means to personal triumph,"[6] the young theologian returns home with a keen sense of membership in an esoteric club, displaying his rarefied tools to the annoyance of all and the hurt of some. Thielicke observes, "Young theologians manifest certain trumped-up intellectual effects which actually amount to nothing."[7]

The only cure for this malady, insists Thielicke, is an active faith that cultivates love, that is, living one's faith out of love for God and those around us. Our theology must be worked out in the life of the church,

We must also take seriously the fact that the "subject" of theology, Jesus Christ, can only be regarded rightly if we are ready to meet Him on the plane where he is active, that is, within the Christian church.[8]

and it must be worked out in light of eternity,

A well-known theologian once said that dogmatics is a lofty and difficult art. That is so, in the first place, because of its purpose. It reflects upon the last things; it asks wherein lies the truth about our temporal and eternal destiny.[9]

and it must be worked out in spiritual battle,

Thus it is possible to become an eschatological romanticist ... Such a person nevertheless has not comprehended a penny’s worth of what it means to live on the battlefield of the risen Lord, between the first and second coming, waiting and praying as a Christian.[10]

Thielicke knew the true exercise of a theologian's faith in spiritual battle. In 1935, he was refused a post at Erlangen due to his commitment to the Confessing Church, which opposed National Socialism, and in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was famously active. In 1936, he became professor of systematic theology at Heidelberg. But he was dismissed in 1940 after repeated interrogations by the Gestapo. He went on to pastor a church in Ravensburg, and in 1942 began teaching in Stuttgart, until the bombing in 1944, when he fled to Korntal. After the war ended, he began teaching at Tübingen, and finally in Hamburg, where he pastored the large congregation of St. Michaelis.

Finally, Thielicke warns the young theologian—older ones need this, too—to beware of reading Scripture only as a matter of exegetical endeavor rather than God’s "word to me." He urges a "prayed dogmatics,"[11] in which theological thought breathes "only in the atmosphere of dialogue with God."[12] "A person who pursues theological courses is spiritually sick unless he reads the Bible uncommonly often."[13]

While we will not agree with Thielicke's theology at every point, the gist of his message to young theological students is so pointed that there is nothing quite like it in English. Within our own tradition, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield delivered an address at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1911 entitled "The Religious Life of Theological Students."[14] In the strongest possible terms, Warfield pleads for a godly and learned ministry: "But before and above being learned, a minster must be godly. Nothing could be more fatal, however, than to set these two things over against one another."[15] He sums this emphasis up nicely, "Put your heart into your studies."[16]

No exercise in the young theologian's or minister's life is better calculated to keep him humble than regular contact with God himself. Warfield cautions his students:

I am here today to warn you to take seriously your theological study, not merely as a duty, done for God's sake and therefore made divine, but as a religious exercise, itself charged with religious blessing to you; as fitted by its very nature to fill all your mind and heart and soul and life with divine thoughts and feelings and aspirations and achievements. You will never prosper in your religious life in the Theological Seminary until your work in the Theological Seminary becomes itself to you a religious exercise out of which you draw every day enlargement of heart, elevation of spirit, and adoring delight in your Maker and Savior.[17]

We are, after all, called to be warriors; but the kind of spiritual warrior that Scripture calls us to be is not the gladiator seeking personal victory and glory, but rather the soldier of the cross who seeks to magnify the person of his Savior and Lord. J. Gresham Machen captured this spirit well in his sermon "Constraining Love." Christian militancy should never be confused with sectarian belligerence, hubris, or meanness of spirit. But pride can also move us to shrink in cowardice from defending the truth of the gospel. Machen made this clear in his sermon to the second general assembly of our, then, new church. How many movements, he asked,

have begun bravely like this one, and then have been deceived by Satan ... into belittling controversy, condoning sin and error, seeking favor from the world or from a worldly church, substituting a worldly urbanity for Christian love. May Christ's love indeed constrain us that we may not thus fall![18]

If Christianity teaches us nothing else it must teach us the value of the cross—the chief expression of God's constraining love for sinners. If we learn nothing else from the cross we must learn humility—a humility that clings to the Savior who died to save us. As we minister, whether young or old, we must always remember that "we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Cor. 4:7).

Endnotes

[1] Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, trans. Charles L. Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962).

[2] Helmut Thielicke, Encounter with Spurgeon, trans. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963).

[3] Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, 10.

[4] Ibid., 12.

[5] Ibid., 16.

[6] Ibid., 17, 19.

[7] Ibid., 11–12.

[8] Ibid., 23.

[9] Ibid., 27.

[10] Ibid., 29–30.

[11] Ibid., 33.

[12] Ibid., 34.

[13] Ibid., 40.

[14] Benjamin B. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 1:411–25.

[15] Ibid., 412.

[16] Ibid., 416.

[17] Ibid., 417.

[18] J. Gresham Machen, "Constraining Love," in God Transcendent and Other Sermons, ed. Ned Bernard Stonehouse (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 141.

Ordained Servant Online, February 2012.