Posted on 05/08/2006 5:54:33 PM PDT by sionnsar
I am no liturgical atavist, though I agree with the wisdom of Dr Peter Toon’s suggestion that the 1928 Book of Common Prayer should have remained as the liturgical standard, with the 1979 book as a Book of Alternative Services. Nevertheless, and granting its deficiencies, I am partial to the Rite II eucharistic liturgy of the 1979 Prayerbook, and opening that liturgy with the Penitential Order and the Decalogue, as our parish has done every Sunday since September 2001 save during Eastertide, goes a long way toward rectifying some of those deficiencies.
But if Episcopalian supplemental liturgical materials from the late 1980s to the present suffer from any heresies (and they do!), then chief among them are trinitarian heresies, from modalism to unitarianism. Indeed, I have said and written more than once that the principal cause of our confusion as a Church over human sexuality is the idolatry of some of our (non-Prayerbook) liturgical expressions and the trinitarian heresy of much doctoral, presbyteral, and episcopal trinitarian theological speculation (cf. Romans 1). “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and “the God who made us, who saves us, and who will never leave us alone” are not substitutes for the trinitarian Name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
To understand the following anecdote, you must know that our eldest daughter’s name is not Amy, nor anything like Amy. But she has been reading Little Women, which may explain her choice of misnomer.
This evening, while driving home from a friend’s house, our eldest daughter asked whether my wife and I had thought more about leaving our Episcopalian parish (we have discussed some of the current troubles with our children, to a degree appropriate to each child’s age). She and her sisters do not want to leave; they have, as they put it, “gone to this church all [their] lives.” (Nor do we have any plans to leave, at least not at this point. But, as my wife puts it, the staff is by the door.) She asked whether there were still fighting in the Church over “the bishop who is gay”. I answered that yes, there was, and made certain that she understood the traditional stance that would welcome gay Christians into the Church, but that would not bless relationships that the Scriptures and catholic tradition deem unholy and that would not countenance the ordination of people in sexual relationships outside that of (heterosexual) marriage.
But, I told her, there were much more serious problems in The Episcopal Church and had been for some forty years or so. She and her younger sister were aghast to learn that there were clerics, including bishops, in the Church who denied the uniqueness of Jesus, the possibility of salvation only through him, and who denied his deity; and that there were those who denied that God is the Holy Trinity, and who specifically denied - or changed the Name of - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I then explained to her the alterations made in some of the supplemental liturgical materials.
“That’s just stupid,” she replied. And then she paused for a moment, screwing her face into a disgusted look.
“It’s like calling me Amy.”
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. A good choice.
They better pick up that staff and start walking. And explain to the kids that sometimes you have to leave your home (like when it burns down.) Read Genesis 19 with them.
(It is, technically speaking, an English sentence - even a usually active verb need not have an object (it becomes an intransitive verb temporarily) - but it's a very bad one, as your son correctly observed.)
No, the revisionism is focused--for now--on differentiating Jesus being Son of God from being Son of the Father. John 3:16 is rendered "For God so loved the world that God sent the only begotten Son..." Is the God "who so loved" the same deity as the one who sends the Son? And what is the relationship between the Son and the God(s)?
The revisionism doesn't stop there. In Evangelical Lutheran Worship the Creeds have been altered (without an explicit mandate from a Churchwide Assembly, as though a national convention could act so unilaterally independent of Western Christendom) so that Jesus no longer descends into Hell in the Apostles' Creed, except by an asterisk and tiny footnote. And the filioque has been struck from the Nicene Creed, purportedly to improve relations with the Eastern Churches. Strange, the Lutherans schism is with the West...I thought the order of business was to patch things up with Rome and to let Rome deal with the East.
What's the rationale (if one could call it that)? If you would be so kind, would you post the "new and improved" Creed as formulated by the revisionists? Thanks.
I've used this analogy on FR many times before, but when we finally left ECUSA and paddled across the Tiber (doing exuberant rear deck rolls all the way), we realized that we had been sitting mourning beside a dead and desiccated corpse, while our real Mother Church was alive and beautiful and waiting to welcome us just around the corner.
Another family homestead is now under Lake Weiss in NE Alabama.
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