Every time an Anglican converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, from lowly American deacons to English bishops, a story is told by way of explanation: Anglicanism, once a proud bastion of purely Protestant doctrines and practices, was hijacked by sacerdotal pretenders beginning in the Oxford Movement, and now, downstream from sham midcentury liturgical reforms, Anglicans have…
Glow, gentle canticle, in the endless ether— ring radiant across the radius of curse, flow faster than lashes, ride with rigid grasp. The hollows gape and holler as you flash in the shallows, a holy sheen holding steady— they didn’t know about you and the new brine we breathe.
As I have noted previously, Cranmer’s Eucharistic liturgy of 1552 had a distinctive shape – Law-Gospel-Repentance-Supper-Thanksgiving – which was retained for most Anglican rites down to the middle of the twentieth century. The main, and for almost two hundred years the only, exception was that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which was a hybrid of…
Practical Application Having discussed the reasons for infant baptism, as well as notable arguments against it, and the orthodox responses to those arguments, it remains to be seen why such a work as this treatise is necessary, or at least expedient, and how its content applies to our current ecclesial context. Our practical applications for…
This week the virtual studio is FULL with all three Miserable Offenders present to discuss a recent article by Gillis Harp appearing at The Gospel Coalition. Dr. Harp urges Anglicans to stay true to their confessions, and while we all agreed with this premise we had plenty to discuss regarding Harp’s particular way of applying…
During the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became common among Anglican divines to refer to works as a “condition” of justification. Alister McGrath traces this development to the fact that “the idea of justification sola fide came under suspicion, perhaps reflecting a growing concern about its possible links with antinomianism.” Hence figures such as…
The most strange emotion I’ve ever felt in a church is something I’ve come to coin as “Spiritual Whiplash”—the feeling of being swept up in the grandeur, emotion, and beauty of a spiritual experience, and then immediately having that drained out of you by a sudden realization that the emotion was completely disconnected from reality….
One of the old saws when I was training for the ministry, was that Cranmer had the shape of the Communion service all wrong. This assertion was, of course, based on a 1945 book called The Shape of the Liturgy by an Anglican Benedictine called Gregory Dix. Leaving aside the fact that Dix rejected Cranmer’s…
Antitheses Credo-baptists argue against infant baptism on multiple fronts: 1) from Scripture, 2) from Christian antiquity, 3) from the discontinuity between baptism and circumcision, 4) from the illustrative deficiencies of infant baptism, and 5) from the risks involved in infant baptism. 1) The antitheses from Holy Scripture usually take one of these three forms. a)…
We have all had that unwelcome guest who didn’t quite fit in. On the surface, he or she comes off as awkward, bombastic, or just a little larger than life. We have also had those cases where, at times, the unwelcome guest positively surprises us. In many ways, the soul is that unwelcome guest. The…
