Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Excellent Article on the Episcopal Church

It describes how it has gone astray and how the theological liberals (i.e., those purporting to be Christians but who disbelieve the faith) play fast and loose with the faith. And this was in the New Yorker. The main aspects revolve around the gay bishop that was ordained a few years ago.

Theological liberalism is dependant on dishonesty with the laypeople. Here is a great quote from the article (emphasis mine):

In the current Anglican conflict, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been happening for more than a century. With the advance of science and the growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, key theologians and churchmen concluded by the early twentieth century that the old faith had been essentially disproved. They began to imagine a more reasonable Christianity—one less insistent on miracles, resurrections, and a transcendent God who directed human history from a heavenly remove. Higher Criticism informed a new understanding of the historical Jesus; the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God, an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress.

The new theology met stout resistance within the churches. The “modernist-fundamentalist controversy” of the nineteen-twenties split some of the mainline Protestant denominations, and eventually gave rise to the modern evangelical movement. The Episcopal Church, because of its liturgical unity and comprehensiveness—Elizabeth’s notion: Believe what you want, just use this book—was better able to absorb the new thinking, or, at least, to mask it. “Under the guise of Anglican comprehensiveness, and under the cover of Anglo-Catholic worship and liturgy, this alien religion took root in the Western Anglican world,” says Leslie Fairfield, a professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a Pennsylvania seminary with an evangelical orientation. “The idea was ‘Keep all the same words, change all the meanings, but don’t tell the laypeople.’ ”