I am cognizant of these issues, and am simply asserting my agreement with mainstream scholarship that the passages in question were neither prophecies nor predictions.
Well then what are they? Isaiah is a prophet; what is he doing here if not prophecy? What is the point of it?
I mean true in the sense of truth. The First Peoples of our nation have evidently lived here for 60,000 years, and they do not have a Flood Story. Many peoples and cultures do have a Flood Story. The ancient people of Gilgamesh had a Flood Story. General consensus aging puts Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldees (no doubt with the Flood Story) around 2000 BCE. I don't find arguing the nuts and bolts of the story overly helpful. Clearly, there was a Flood of some significant proportions, and whilst the accounts may be myths and legends, I suspect that it did not cover Australia, which was outside the knowledge and experience of the tellers of the tale, myths and legends have an origin and that may well be in what happened. The truth of the account in Genesis is about God who loves us and covenants with us and foreshadows the Baptism to come by which we die to sin and rise to newness of life. The story doesn't need to be historically accurate to carry the truth. The account of Job is probably a-historical, as is the account of the Good Samaritan, yet both these accounts carry truth and wisdom. In general terms, I don't wear either label (conservative or liberal) well, if at all. I don't think Pilate got much of an answer when he asked Jesus the question, and you probably don't think I have given you much of an answer, however, perhaps you understand me a little more.
No chance. Even evangelical commentators (following Calvin!) recognize that the plain sense is obviously not a messianic prophecy. Treating it as such is equivalent to calling heads or tails after the coin has been tossed (and revealed).
Cleary you did not read what I actually said here, judging from your reply to my post. Neither you, nor I, nor any theologian who reads the words quoted by the evangelist, as spoken by Christ on the cross, can be certain that those words are a code for this:- " All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it." or this:- " Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!" "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"! It is by FAITH alone, (there is no New testament evidence either way), that we can now contemplate the possibility that Christ's words were INTENDED by HIM at that time, to refer to the final verses of Psalm 22. They might just as likely have been the cry of despair raised by a human being inundated and overwhelmed by the weight of the SIN of the entire human race, experiencing the gulf of separation from, God who had, in that experience, appeared to have utterly abandoned him. .
Theoretically they might have been the cry of despair that a human being might have raised, but they were not. We know this for the simple reason that Jesus was not merely a human being. Jesus was and is God the Son, and He always did and said what the Father told Him to do. Especially when He was lifted up on the cross! John 5:30 I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me. John 12:49 For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. John 8:28 ...When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things. We should not say things which could lead another to think that Jesus had a 'panic attack' or said something He should not have said. Nor should we say things which could be taken as suggesting that Jesus was just a man, because a reader might be misled toward Arianism. Such things may not have been your intent (I hope they weren't), but it's rather easy to interpret the statement in ways that might lead to wrong beliefs about Jesus.
The fact remains that the New Testament itself contains no irrefutable evidence that Jesus Christ was quoting psalm 22, (other than perhaps the coincidence that Christ is also reported to have said "It is finished"), a meaning also echoed in the last words of psalm 22, "it is acomplished" - or - "and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, Ps.22:31 "saying that he, [God], has done it." What Invictus says though is technically correct. Psalm 22 is not strictly speaking prophesy, in genre. It is inspired poetry which can now, in hindsight be understood to be a prophetic insight, but not a specific prophetic utterance or a revealed, conscious, prediction of the future. It is in fact only Biblical inerrantists who are unconsciously adding to it "This is the Word of the Lord", (even though it might well be). .
3-4 years ago, discussions here gave me the impression that the Anglican Communion was treating certain other Anglican church groups as if they were no longer part of the Communion. (Some people on the forum told me that ACNA is outside the Communion, for example.) So, de facto, the split was already happening or had happened. During about the last year, the Anglican Communion's attitude seemed to shift and we saw Welby act all welcoming toward those other Anglicans (I think he realized how much of his power base he'd alienated). If the CoE were to claim now that those groups are still de jure in the Communion and can't leave without going through the Communion's processes and procedures, I think the GAFCON and whatnot churches are in a good position to say, "in your dreams! We're already gone." When one is part of a club, one can leave the club at any time. Just stop showing up. The club has no power to say, "Wait! You can't stop being a member of our club until you fill out these forms in triplicate! You are still a member until we say otherwise!" Aside from all of that, if the CoE were to install a woman as Abp of Canterbury, I think that would further accentuate the feelings of alienation. Traditionalist-minded Anglicans would not take it well. So it would be a bad move for the CoE to make, regardless of how capable that woman might be.
If only it were that simple… The fact is they’re not “gone,” and they clearly don’t wish to be. The long view is that the GAFCON rift has a good chance of being healed a little further down the road. Even the ACNA schism is more likely than not to be healed at some point.
GAFCON+GSFA is where the Communion is. The rift will heal when the Canterbury-aligned churches repent and return. The Kigali Commitment simply relocates the center of the Anglican Communion away from Canterbury to the orthodox Churches. There are canon-law issues that will take some time (probably years) to work out, but the deed is done. Canterbury and its aligned Provinces are now out of Communion with the greater Anglican world, and will remain so until they repent of their false teaching. The Instruments of Unity are a dead letter (as everyone involved understands) and carry no functional weight in the Communion -- this has been the case ever since TEC defied the 1998 Lambeth I.10 injunction and faced no penalty for it from Canterbury. Justin Welby himself has said that the "Instruments of Unity" do not confer actual enforcement authority on Canterbury, and so any legal weight they carry is largely confined to how seriously a given provincial Canon Court wishes to take them. Eventually the African churches will modify their Canons to conform to the Kigali Commitment/Cairo Covenant, and that will be that. It'll take awhile to do, but it's paperwork -- the important stuff has already been done. The Global Anglican Communion is now defined by doctrine as defined in the historical Anglican formularies, not by its relationship to Canterbury. I was glad to see a unity of purpose between the GAFCON contingent and the GSFA bishops. There's been some friction there in the past, and although some of that friction will remain, there is now a unity of purpose as well as of doctrine. One of the biggest achievements of the Kigali conference was getting both groups to sing from the same hymnal. My priest gave a talk on Sunday about his experience in Kigali, and everything I've heard so far indicates that GAFCON+GSFA leadership consider this a done deal. He effused about the presence of the Spirit at the conference, and the unity of purpose he found there among nearly all attendees. How much will this change things? In America, very little: ACNA and TEC will continue on very much as they have for the last decade. For ACNA, there will be a greater emphasis now on both spiritual and physical growth now that the broader church-politics issue has been clarified. Church planting and unity of liturgical worship are going to be important going forward -- Archbishop Beach has said many times that he wants to see the 2019 BCP being used consistently across the ACNA dioceses.
The Nigerian Anglican Church already did it way back in 2005. I don't think it will take the other GSFA churches all that long to do likewise, now that there is consensus on how to proceed.
That makes Nigeria an outlier. We're in 2023 now. All a GAFCON schism would achieve is yet another Protestant confederation with no real binding doctrine of the Church. Although the issues are not really doctrinal in nature, moves toward perceived "doctrinal purity" are empty slogans if they do not involve unity with the vast majority of Christians worldwide who belong to the main historic Churches - viz., Rome and the Orthodox - and they cannot be moves toward unity in any sense if they also newly exclude a large portion of the Protestant world as well. "We have no particular theological statement of our own to fence us off from other Churches. We have no international power structure which forces our younger Churches to conform to some alien pattern of life. We have no central executive power. We have no uniform Prayer Book. We have no common language. We have no laws which limit the freedom of any Church to decide its life as it will. We have no ecclesiastical colonies. We have no ‘Anglican’ religion. We have no test of membership save that of Baptism itself. We have nothing to hold us together except the one essential unity given us in our full communion. And even that is not limited to Anglican Churches, for we share in the table of other Churches as well, in increasing number." (Bishop Stephen Bayne, Sermon in 1964). Problems of identity, unity and authority, were not solved, and sometimes were not specifically addressed, by the expansion of the Church of England overseas. The "Anglican Communion" - an expression first used in 1851 - is simply a number of autonomous bodies which exactly reproduce the same problems of identity as the parent Church. They are united in having had, in different legal conditions, to re-define their relationship to host political communities as a consequence of the constitutional separations of Church and State made, in the case of America in the eighteenth century, and elsewhere in the nineteenth. Source: Edward Norman, Authority in the Anglican Communion, Ecclesiastical Law Society Lecture given during Lambeth Conference, 1998 http://justus.anglican.org/resources/misc/norman98.html From one standpoint, the GAFCON movement is revealing institutional problems that were already there, so Nigeria didn't really 'change' anything fundamental in that respect. With those limitations in mind, I'm actually rather optimistic about the future.
What?!? It's entirely a doctrinal issue! The fact that liberals think it isn't is a large part of the problem. If one person tells you you're drunk, you can laugh it off. But if 85% of the people in the bar tell you you're drunk, then you're drunk and it's time to go home and sober up.
It concerns differences in practice, not belief. It is by definition a dispute over discipline, not doctrine. The creeds don’t do ethics. Nevertheless it’s an important and legitimate discussion that should occur, with a few caveats: 1. At some point a decision needs to be made, and then everybody needs to move on, whether they’re entirely satisfied with the decision or not; 2. The issue is substantially more complicated than the popular-level rhetorical stances present it; 3. It’s not a matter of faith, by definition, and charges of “heresy” and “apostasy” are baseless and indefensible, and need to stop.
Yeah, I think you've nailed it. I would hope that all Christians could agree that same-sex physical intimacy and lust for members of the same sex are sinful (but I suspect there are some "Christians" who prefer to think otherwise). For those of us who do agree with that premise, any action taken by the church that could reasonably be construed as condoning such sins, or considering them not to be sins, can reasonably be understood to encourage those lusts and activities. Indulging in these thoughts and actions will be 'normalized' in those churches and an example will be set, not just for those who are already engaged in such behaviors, but also in onlookers both within and without the church. What makes it a doctrinal issue? It's this: Christians honor the teachings of the Bible as the inspired word of God. That is a Christian doctrine. The Bible teaches that Christians, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, are fundamentally changed and no longer are bound to sin. The Bible teaches that Christians are not to use their grace as an excuse to sin; rather, they are to avoid occasions leading to sin. A Christian therefore will generally exhibit characteristics of a changed life; his actions will (not perfectly, but in general) reflect God living in and through him. He will live his life in a manner that's generally consistent with the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The Bible teaches that same-sex lusts and physical couplings are unnatural and are displeasing to God (Romans 1:22-32, among others). Jesus shows us His expectation that believers should "go and sin no more," or at least go and make the attempt. A Christian should greatly desire to please God, and he should not desire to flaunt behaviors that might encourage others to emulate a lifestyle that involves sin. All of this is taught in the Bible, therefore all of it goes to Christian doctrine. A Christian does not merely believe that Christ redeemed him; a Christian also holds the belief that he should be "light" and "salt," a good example, and a good representative of his Savior. Coming to church with a same-sex lover and letting one's sinful lifestyle be known within the church does not set a good example; worse yet is the church which appoints such a person to a leadership position. The letter to the Ephesians says (Ch. 2) we are saved by grace through faith and not by works. True enough. But that same letter (Ch. 5) also says, sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints...For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them...Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. Those who would claim the Good News found in Chapter 2 need also to accept the caveats and clarifications in Chapter 5 and elsewhere. We are not motivated by hatred toward LGBs. Far from it! But we are motivated by love for them. Love demands that we help the gay individual to step away from sin and become more Christlike. Love demands that we set good examples (and choose church leaders who are good examples). Christians are called to love people as much as Christ did, but Christians are also called to hate and expose sin as much as Christ did. We would never encourage a fellow Christian to continue cheating on his or her spouse, to take someone else's property, or to continue covetousness or gossip-spreading. Why do churches take actions that encourage same-sex sexual sin? It makes no sense. Instead the churches should set the proper example and should lovingly explain why we as Christians should avoid (even run from) situations that would lead toward sin. Same-sex sin should be exposed, not covered up or glossed over. All of this is laid out in the Gospels and the Epistles, and it is part and parcel of our Christian doctrinal beliefs.
This is circular reasoning. What exactly are the teachings to which you refer, which ones are binding on a person’s conscience, and how do we know that? Also, a doctrinal matter concerns an object of belief; we are talking about actions, not beliefs. The relevant category is discipline, not doctrine. Confusing the two entails the denial of Justification by Faith. The Word of God that is the ultimate standard for Christians is Jesus, not a mere collection of books. The issue is not merely what those books say or don’t say about divine law, but rather what kind of community the followers of Jesus were intended to be. Even on the most conservative readings of parts of Leviticus and NT epistles, the fact remains that one of the distinctives of Jesus’ movement was that he welcomed society’s ‘sinners’ and received much criticism for it.