This was encouraging to read! https://anglican.ink/2022/07/15/conservative-win-in-the-church-of-england/ Following the news that evangelicals and other theological conservatives captured key committees in the Anglican Church of Australia, votes for a key committee in the Church of England (CodE) appear to indicate a knife-edge victory as well. The Crown Nominations Commission is the body that provides the UK Prime Minister with a list of two candidates for diocesan Bishops. Six members elected from the Houses of Clergy and Laity in a recent election will form part of the 14 voting members that decide on whom to nominate. The new members of the Crown Nominations Commission will serve until 2027. According to observers on the progressive Thinking Anglicans website conservatives won most of the positions in a 52% to 48% vote. If this percentage is accurate, it also reveals how the members of the General Synod may lean. One long-time observer described the result as “shockingly conservative.” The Church of England is facing key decisions on human sexuality within the life of the General Synod, elected in 2021, which met this week.
Thanks for the new term I can add to my vocabulary: Church Psepsologist which I take to be someone who engages in the political life of the Church as a "numbers-person" If we need such people then I am not sure we are not conforming to the patterns of power in this world, rather than being transformed by the renewal of our minds. Anyway thanks for sharing, it served as a springboard for some further thinking.
Let's do some rough arithmetic. If the 52% vote meant 52% of the House of Clergy and House of Laity members of the CNC were conservatives that give us 3.12. As General Synod objects to cutting people up to meet decimal fractions let's be on the generous side and round it up to 4. That would give the conservatives a total of 4 members on a commission of 14. That does nothing to raise my hopes that the CNC will be making conservative appointments to bishoprics and deaneries as much as I would like them to.
A psephologist is a person who studies elections/methods of counting. For example Antony Green is the ABC's psephologist. If an organisation writes rules around elections it's usually a good idea to have someone who understands how different counting methods and different ways of structuring a ballot influence the outcomes of those elections.
Andrew Swift, Bishop of Brechin, weighs in on the "Calls" issued for the 2022 Lambeth conference, particularly the (possible) reaffirmation of Resolution I.10: It may surprise some here, given my conservative lean, but I agree with Bp. Swift. As currently explained, a "Call" can only be positively affirmed; the only other option is, "Let me think about it and get back to you." And I agree with his sentiment that this was a calculated move on Canterbury's part -- to foster a false sense of "unity" to paper over fundamental divisions. The Bishop of Leicester made haste to reassure the liberals that even a reaffirmation of I.10 wouldn't carry any real weight: I've always assumed that Lambeth's 2022 resolutions on homosexuality would preserve the status quo, and nothing I've read so far changes my mind. The goal for Canterbury is to placate the African primates and give them a fig leaf for staying in the Communion, while at the same time assuring the liberals that nothing of substance is going to change. I think the actual effect of the effort is going to be to exacerbate rather than ease tensions -- neither the liberals nor the conservatives trust Abp. Welby at this point. But take heart, liberals! The Bishop of Los Angeles wants to reassure you that Episcopalians don't consider Biblical teaching authoritative anyway: "Rootedness" must be the current euphemism among liberals for rejecting historical truth. Truth in Apostolic times is no longer truth now, and the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ must submit to the teachings of our modern intellectual overlords. This Lambeth conference is going to be a hoot. I almost wish I could go just to see the fireworks up close. EDIT: Ha! That was fast.
Who were the true religious conservatives in Jesus Christ's time on earth, the Pharisees or the Saducees? Which were the more 'Biblical'? .
Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question, the Sadducees were the 'conservatives', in the sense of adhering to a rigidly construed traditional understanding. The Pharisees are better understood as 'populists', in that they sought to bring much of the priestly practice down to the everyday level of the common person.
The answer is "neither". Sadducees for the most part ignored the Bible as a pragmatic measure, relying on tradition; the Pharisees attached their own rules and regulations to Scripture and tried to force their own inventions on everyone else. When Christ refuted slanders directed at him by the Pharisees, he would usually respond with a Biblical teaching by saying, "It is written" or "Is it not written". Christ was the true Bible-thumper of the bunch. He was a great Bible preacher and teacher. Every teaching, every debate, every sermon or speech he gave, was grounded in Scripture. Jesus himself was the "religious conservative" of the New Testament. He is the model we should all follow. This is why Paul was perhaps the greatest of the Apostles. He retained his learning and pharisaic zeal, but had it rightly directed to the preaching and teaching of true doctrine received from Jesus Christ himself. Paul is what the Pharisees should have been. We also have the Essenes, who for some reason never enter these conversations. They were the ascetics of the Jewish world, and some think that John the Baptist either had been one of them or had dealings with them. But you really can't call them Biblical conservatives either (for example, they refused to accept the book of Esther as canonical because it doesn't mention God and initiates the holiday of Purim, which Essenes seem to have regarded as a pagan festival).
The point I was trying to make was that both of them were basically 'conservative' in that they considered themselves the custodians of orthodoxy concerning the Jewish faith yet neither could agree on what exactly that 'orthodoxy' should totally be. They also both considered Jesus to be heterodox and opposed him because of his perceived 'liberality'. Their opposition to Jesus of Nazareth and his teaching was probably more a case of personal dislike and disdain of the non religious than of theological conservatism and biblical understanding. .
Read Josephus. By the time of Christ, the Sadducees -- traditional keepers of the Temple, and the social status that went along with it -- had basically become the political and social upper-crust in Jerusalem and were increasingly secularized. They considered most of the lower-class Jews around them as their social inferiors. Most of them didn't believe in an afterlife, nor that there was any reward after death, so you really can't say they were religious in the sense that we use the word. And by the time of Jesus, many had become thoroughly Hellenized in the Hasmonean mold, to the point that they were more Greek than Jewish. In politics they were pragmatic, first with the Greeks and then with the Romans, preferring accommodation to conflict. The Pharisees are caricatured as religious zealots, but their views had more to do with their own traditions that it had to do with any real exegetical readings of Scripture. Jesus' favorite epithet for them was "hypocrite", because they so seldom lived out the rules they preached to others. Not all Pharisees were intolerant and judgemental, of course; we have the example of Nicodemus and (maybe) Joseph of Arimathea. Paul was trained by Gamaliel, who had a reputation as a just and upright man (according to both Josephus and the Talmud). The hectoring, vicious Pharisees who hounded Jesus and his Apostles afterward were centered in Jerusalem, but their passionate hatred of Jesus was more at his effrontery in challenging their authority than anything. He not only called them hypocrites, but proved it by quoting their own Scripture back at them. I know that antinomians love to throw the "Pharisee!" canard at conservatives, but it just reflects how little they know of the actual details. Not all rules are bad, not all rule-making is bad, enforcing the rules is (usually) good, and t he Pharisees were as often guilty of violating their own rules as they were at condemning others for the same offense. Christ did not rebuke them for their rules; he rebukes them for not following them. See Matt. 23:1-12 where Jesus unloads on them: EDIT: I meant Matt. 23:1-12. Stupid fingers.
I still think it's a flawed comparison. The closest you can get to modern Biblically-orthodox Christians are the Essenes, not the Pharisees. And even then it's a tremendous stretch. Christ really did start a "new thing" in his ministry, but he wasn't some long-haired hippie. Even John the Apostle, who preached the love and compassion of Jesus Christ more than anyone else in the Bible, would write this in his Revelation (Rev. 19:10-21): Christ is the loving, meek, Lamb of God. He is also a mighty conquering King. Don't let God's love blind you to his wrath.
I have read Josephus, along with the NT, Philo, the Mishnah, and some of the Tannaitic Midrashim. With respect, I do not see how this is cogent or relevant to the question @Tiffy was asking. For example, the reason the Sadducees didn't believe in an afterlife was because the Torah doesn't teach that there is one. In fact, the only clear reference in the entire OT/Tanakh to an afterlife is at the end of the book of the Daniel, and the Sadducees were known to prioritize the Torah. Pre-exilic Israelite religion was thus unique in the ANE in that life after death was not a point of emphasis. The Sadducees were 'conservatives' in the sense that they simply maintained that pattern. It is also important to note that not all priests were Sadducees. Being a priest did not make one a member of a Sadducee 'class'. Nor were the priests unpopular among the people: it was the priests who led the revolt in 66-70 CE, after all. The NT accounts of the Pharisees likely tell us a lot more about what mid-to-late 1st century Christians thought about the Pharisees than they do about what the majority of the Pharisees were actually like in Jesus' day, and what Jesus thought about them. By and large, they were a 'populist' movement, mostly composed of laypeople, not priests, and who were out of political power during Jesus' lifetime. The notion that they had the ability to force their convictions on anyone is anachronistic at best. The Pharisees were simply filling a needed role, that another group would have filled if the Pharisees had not survived their fall from power in the previous century. Most Jews in Palestine did not belong to a specific 'party', and there were other groups (e.g., the Essenes, the followers of John the Baptist, and others) who differed with the Pharisees on some points of interpretation. This is correct. If we read between the lines, we may infer that the historical Jesus' appraisal of, and interactions with, the Pharisees in Galilee of his day were considerably more positive (as well as complex) than the simplistic one-sided caricatures that many Christians read into those narratives today. As interesting as this subject is, I am not sure that it belongs in this thread. I'd be happy to discuss it further in a thread specifically devoted to it, but I'm not sure what it has specifically to do with the subject of this one.