This is a guest-post by the Very Reverend William N. McKeachie, Dean Emeritus of South Carolina and Convener of Mere Anglicanism: With apologies to the producers of that 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, I suspect I shall long look back on Holy Week and Eastertide in this Year of our Lord 2011 as a time of “Four Blessings and a Blasphemy”. First, some background.
When I turned sixty-six years old in 2009, it seemed, for more reasons than age alone, the right time to retire from full-time ordained ministry in the US Episcopal Church or TEC, to use the currently preferred denominational acronym. For the previous fourteen years I had joyfully served under two Bishops of South Carolina as Dean of that diocese and its cathedral. I was gratified to be asked by the current Bishop, the Right Reverend Mark Lawrence, whose consecration committee I had been privileged to chair, to continue serving as one of his Examining Chaplains, as an at-large member of his newly formed Anglican Communion Relations Committee, and (as Dean Emeritus) to play a part in the diocese’s increasingly contentious review of relations with TEC nationally.
As one who had been baptized in the Church of England in 1962, confirmed in the US Episcopal Church in 1963, ordained deacon in Canada and priest in England in 1970, and canonically licensed to serve over the years in several Anglican jurisdictions, I have always been grateful for the ecclesial identity of what it means to be an Anglican Christian, lay or ordained, an identity transcending time and space in this Communion’s continuity of faith and order.
More recently, however, as I have become deeply saddened by the drift of TEC away from biblical orthodoxy and by its aggressive litigation against parishes and dioceses denominationally alienated by TEC’s own self-betrayal, it has seemed timely for me to lend what support I can to the re-alignment movement within the Anglican Communion at large. Rock-solid in its faithfulness as the Diocese of South Carolina remains, there are other parts of TEC where, for the sake of biblical Christian witness, orthodox Anglicans are surely called to align with non-TEC jurisdictions.
In support of such beleaguered brothers and sisters in Christ, and with the tacit encouragement of Bishop Lawrence in South Carolina, I accepted the invitation of my “Mere Anglicanism” friend the Reverend Dr. William Dickson to join his staff as Dean in Residence at Saint Andrew’s Parish, Fort Worth, Texas. This has proved, at least for me, a “more excellent way” of remaining committed to Anglicanism as a whole and to its global perspective above and beyond its current fissures, while at the same time being afforded a close-up view of the perfidy of TEC on the ground locally.
First, some blessings! For my own family, Easter this year was celebrated, like every other Easter so far in the course of our family life, by breaking bread together, both sacred and secular: around the Lord’s Table and then around a festive groaning board following church! Moreover, here at Saint Andrew’s, Fort Worth, where the liturgy is conducted according to traditional Prayer Book norms, the preaching is forthrightly biblical and expository, the choral music and hymnody reflect the best of the cathedral heritage adapted to parochial use, and the beauty of holiness is palpable in the worship of the Lord, the entire McKeachie family, far removed though we were from South Carolina, knew ourselves still to be in none other than the house of God and at the gate of heaven.
Then, five days later, it seemed that the meaning and message of “family” took on even greater renewed hopefulness, and on a global scale, as we and billions of television viewers world-wide were able virtually to join the invited congregation in Westminster Abbey at the unapologetically Christian marriage of Prince William of Wales and Miss Catherine Middleton. Truth to tell, unlike many American Anglophiles and despite all my transatlantic comings and goings over the years, I have never been a particularly mesmerized Royalist! On the other hand, during the 1950s and early 60s when my religiously agnostic parents and I first lived in England, God in His providence did woo and win me to Christ through the ministry and liturgy of that “Royal Peculiar” Westminster Abbey; so I confess to a (perhaps) inordinate affection for that holy place as well as the inclination to pay close attention to how it does or does not keep faith with its own spiritual patrimony.
From all that I saw and heard, this particular Royal Wedding - apparently in large part thanks to the preference of the bride and groom themselves - came across as an occasion of faithful witness and worship, more about the sovereignty of God than that of the British monarchy! Holy Scripture was honoured and, not so incidentally, very well read by the bride’s brother. The Bishop of London preached a homily that explicitly and winsomely affirmed biblical marriage between a man and a woman. The choice and rendition of liturgical and musical texts and rituals reflected Anglicanism in its best traditional dress. Although I had some curmudgeonly reservations about the “greening” of the Abbey’s nave with transplanted trees, members of our own Altar Guild here at Saint Andrew’s “converted” me to see the point the bride herself evidently wanted to make - not after all so very different in appearance (if on a taller and fuller scale) from the adornment customary in many Anglican churches.
Then the Octave Day of Easter, although it did not dawn bright and sunny in North Texas, transcended its customary nickname of “Low Sunday” by being observed here with an almost full church for the Bishop’s Annual Visitation and Confirmation. Eleven youth and six adults were confirmed and the Bishop of Fort Worth, the Right Reverend Jack Leo Iker, like his opposite number in London two days before, stood tall in the pulpit in proclamation of the Church’s faith and, in particular, of the objective, bodily, transformative Resurrection of Jesus from the dead and our Risen Life in Him.
To be “confirmed” by a Bishop in the apostolic tradition of Anglican Christianity entails forthright commitment to mature discipleship of the Risen Lord Himself and to the Bible’s own witness to Him as the One by whom alone any man or woman may become a member of the Family of His Heavenly Father. Under Bishop Iker, as presented to him by the Rector of this historic Parish, those confirmed at Saint Andrew’s in the One, Catholic and Apostolic Church can humbly but thankfully claim to be in the line of that faith in, and inheritance of, Christ “once delivered to the saints” all those centuries ago. This is a blessing never to be taken lightly, but especially not here, not now, for it is an apostolic identity no longer assured in many TEC dioceses and parishes. Parishioners of Saint Andrew’s, Fort Worth, are blessed indeed to be of this Diocese and of this Parish.
What of Easter Week’s fourth Blessing and what of Blasphemy? In the secular media, of course, the death of Osama bin Laden soon trumped Eastertide. It would not, from a biblical point of view, be inappropriate to think of Osama bin Laden in terms of blasphemy; certainly he has been responsible over many years for terrorist acts, against those created in the image and likeness of God, which Christians and Jews and indeed Mahometans themselves should regard as blasphemous. But in the wake of his death, some - including even Dr. Rowan Williams, archbishop of ambivalence! - are calling into question the propriety of the action taken by the United States to rid the world of bin Laden’s presence. Sed contra, from Christian Fort Worth the view is that his death at the hands of our armed forces was not only not a blasphemy but, in the perspective of God’s providence, a blessing for humane life and civilization everywhere. Indeed, that the United States ensured that his body was buried at sea, within the space of time specified by Mahometan custom, was itself testimony, at once ironic and irenic, to the difference between Judaeo-Christian humanitarianism and fanatical Islamist ideology.
Nor is all this something far removed from us in North Texas. Later this month, thanks to the initiative of SOMA (Sharing of Ministries Abroad), Fort Worthians will have an opportunity to hear at first-hand from the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali what is at stake in twenty-first century radical Islam’s threat to Judaeo-Christian civilization. Bishop Michael, retired Bishop of Rochester in England, is now Episcopal Patron of “Mere Anglicanism” and Assisting Bishop for Anglican Communion Relations in South Carolina. The son of a Shia Muslim father who converted to Christianity, he many years ago in Pakistan followed the call of Christ into the ordained ministry of a post-colonial Anglican Church at that time already besieged by an upsurge of Islamism. Together with his young family, he was hounded out of Pakistan. Later, as a missionary and subsequently as a Bishop in an increasingly secularized Britain - over against which last week’s Royal Wedding was such a refreshing witness - he found himself under threat of death when he spoke out against jihad or simply against the abandonment of a Christian perspective in the observance of British constitutional law.
Bishop Nazir-Ali’s current priority in mission and ministry is to encourage Christians, and especially Anglicans, around the world to “hold fast” to the content and claims of the Christian faith as expressed in God’s Word Written, in the Creeds of the Church Catholic, and in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion which define Reformed Anglicanism. To this end, here in Fort Worth on May 24 Bishop Nazir-Ali will deliver “An Urgent Call to the Western Church” to remain true to its missionary Gospel in the face of the very real persecution of Christians by politicized Islam from without, as well as the threat to the identity of formerly Christian nations by ideological secularism and the dilution of Christian orthodoxy by revisionists from within.
Thus we come to Blasphemy. It is against the dilution, indeed the very betrayal, of Christian truth in the name of pluralism from within the denominational Episcopal Church, that I believe Saint Andrew’s under Dr. William Dickson and the Diocese of Fort Worth under Bishop Jack Iker have been called by God to “stand firm” in this time and place. In the face of the attempt by TEC - half a dozen or more law suits in less than two years in Fort Worth alone - to corral Anglicans here back into denominational line, what is at stake is not only the bricks and mortar, the stone and glass and fabric and finances of this duly constituted Parish and Diocese, but the very name and nature of the God of the Bible as either explicitly professed by the One, Catholic and Apostolic Church or, on the contrary, more than implicitly denied by many if not most of TEC’s leadership. At least here in Fort Worth, but certainly not just here, if one wishes to “hold fast” to what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all” one had better distance oneself from TEC! For it is increasingly clear that it is not inaccurate to describe the conduct of the Presiding Bishop and her henchmen as blasphemous: their “god” is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Despite their capricious rhetorical abuse of language (one thinks of the critiques by the likes of Lewis Carroll and George Orwell of similar semantic chicanery!), especially by way of justifying their relentless, unrighteous litigation - trumped-up law suits and even, here in Fort Worth, intrusive fiduciary interference, one on top of the other - it is evident from the putatively “theological” statements made over many years by Katharine Jefferts Schori and from the legal legerdemain of her Chancellor that neither the form nor the substance of their “religion” is in any biblical or doctrinal sense Christian at all. They shamelessly disguise their claims and threats, both legal and financial, as motivated by “stewardship” and intended to secure the assets and property of the Diocese of Fort Worth and of Saint Andrew’s Parish, purportedly in the name of those who have gone before and those who will come after, for the “mission of the Church.”
Some mission, some Church! Who among those who have gone before, especially those who made their bequests to “the Episcopal Church” prior to the late twentieth century, would be able to recognize either what the current Presiding Bishop professes or the ecclesiastical institution over which she presides as honestly one and the same faith or Church as that in which they themselves had been baptized, taught the catechism, recited the creeds, or received communion? Such a claim would be silly were it not scandalous, bathetic were it not blasphemous.
For it is not difficult to identify the false gospel espoused by Katharine Jefferts Schori. Several years ago, the weblog “Stand Firm” catalogued scores of quotations reflecting what were astutely and accurately identified as her “top five” heresies, the ancient originals of which will be familiar to any reader of Bishop FitzSimons Allison’s book The Cruelty of Heresy -- Gnosticism, Marcionism, Universalism, Pelagianism, and Pluralism.
By all means look up the quotations at
Stand Firm in Faith. They are spiritually scary, all the more so coming from one designated as TEC’s chief pastor and guardian of the faith: scary enough, I suggest, for biblical Anglicans to encourage any and all among their own family and friends who may still belong to a TEC-affiliated congregation (in Fort Worth and many other places) to consider, for their spiritual well-being, shaking such dust from their feet; and further to consider the circumstances of ancient Israel in the Book of Hosea, chapters one and two, as well as the circumstances of the New Israel in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, chapter one, verses 6 – 9.
So what is the spiritual, not merely institutional, bottom-line? What is the heresy, indeed the blasphemy - and, hence, cruelty in its human consequences - that has compromised the biblical integrity of TEC and that, even back in 2006, led us in South Carolina as a matter of principle, and this year canonically, to declare our relationship with TEC to be impaired by TEC’s own actions?
It is the utterly unbiblical notion, recited like a mantra by TEC’s Presiding Bishop, that all human beings, simply by virtue of their natural biological birth, are already children of God, and inheritors of God, and indeed, like the world itself, part of the “Body of God” - to cite a favorite lexical caricature typical of the Presiding Bishop’s phraseology - capable of “living into” their divine inheritance by means of humanly performed social and economic “reconciliation” of the world (Millennium Development Grants, Good Friday observed as Earth Day, LGBTQI “rights” and all that): in other words, what Katharine Jefferts Schori likes to call not so much God’s healing and saving of us but our own “healing of God’s Body”! This is the apotheosis of apostasy, the very definition of blasphemy, especially when TEC “keeps” Holy Week and Eastertide in Fort Worth’s Federal District Court.
Because Anglican Christians and in particular members of this Diocese and this Parish in North Texas have many blessings for which to be thankful, not least (despite the worst TEC seeks to do) during this holy season, it is meet and right that we should rejoice, and be glad, and give God the glory, and set our minds and hearts on things higher than ecclesiastical antagonism.
But by the same token, when we find ourselves confronted, either directly in person or indirectly through the media, with the disingenuous rhetorical spin and aggressive litigious conduct of a once noble and faithful Episcopal Church, let us not shrink from calling a spade a spade, or a lie a lie, or naming impostors and intruders for what they are, or identifying heresy and apostasy by their ancient terms. “By their fruit ye shall know them,” and what confronts us in the words and actions of the leadership of TEC today is the poisonous fruit of a false gospel masquerading as Christianity.
