I belong to a group of Anglican/Episcopal churches that broke away from the authority of the North American bishops, and put themselves under the authority of African or Latin American bishops.
The decisive issue in the break was that our churches were unwilling to go along on the gay marriage / gay priests issue.
The protestant view is that the penal substitution atonement theory of Christ’s crucifixion is central to any protestant theology that still submits itself to the authority of the Bible.
( I believe that ckilmer is describing the penal substitution atonement as the “low view of Christ” ). Pls correct if i am wrong.
http://www.the-highway.com/cross_Packer.html
J. I Packer is an influential theologian in our churches, and in the link he explains the evangelical anglican view of the atonement.
If people don’t like the penal atonement view, and want to understand the Crucifixion in terms of extra-biblical explanations, or want to modify the meaning of the Crucifixion according to human preferences - that’s fine.
But in our group of anglican churches, we follow the bible and accept that we might not like it.
I’m not episcopal. My background presbyterian.
The low view of Christ means that Jesus is considered to be fully man but not fully God.
The low view of Christ takes the Arian position that was anathematized at the council of Nicea. We recite the Nicean creed because of the disputes of the 325 AD.
In the modern age the low view comes through higher criticism school on the continent—where it took over the protestant seminaries after 1848. It jumped the pond for presbyterians in the 1890’s. And completed the takeover in the 1930’s;
the double speak that came out of the seminaries since then would put the communists to shame.
If you want to see how it happened in the presbyterian church—there’s a good author/pastor from the period called Gresham Machen who wrote a book called christianity and liberalism. you can read it online here.
http://www.extremetheology.com/files/MachenLiberalism.pdf
The USA was fertile ground for the higher criticism school because of the work of Issac Newton back in the 1600’s. He was a unitarian. He held to the low view of christ. He was something of a demigod in the anglo saxon world during the 18th and 19th centuries. People simply deferred to him. If the master said it. Well then it must be true. the theological boundary between the liberals and conservative founders of the USA was defined by who they thought Jesus is.
I have for some years laid the decline of the western Christianity at the feet of decartes—whose categorization of the sciences is the basis for all higher education. alas decartes placed theology as a branch of philosophy in the same group as witch craft. Alas, whereas witchcraft if a primitive science that mostly botches cause and effect—theology does not belong on the tree of knowledge at all—because it begins in God. Whereas philosophy begins in man.
Packer lays the decline—at least in reformed theology for two centuries— at the feet of a unitarian polish theologian named Socinus. (however Socinus church converted Newton)
Here’s the passage:
The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus’ critique on Reformed scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy. It forced them to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the various parts of their position, which was good, but it also led them to fight back on the challenger’s own ground, using the Socinian technique of arguing a priori about God as if he were a man — to be precise, a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch, head of both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every point. So the God of Calvary came to he presented in a whole series of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as successfully avoiding all the moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view.2 But these demonstrations, however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Turretin and Hodge, to name but two,3 were very skilful indeed), had builtin weaknesses. Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory, analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic. They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faith — more like a puzzle, we might say, than a gospel. What was happening? Just this: that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game, Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of God’s work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government, drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought. Thus, in their zeal to show themselves rational, they became rationalistic.4 Here as elsewhere, methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud, leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower.http://www.the-highway.com/cross_Packer.html