Fr. Charles Erlandson served as rector of St. Chrysostom’s Reformed Episcopal Church in Hot Spring, Arkansas. In 2009, God called him back home to Tyler and Good Shepherd Church and School, to teach high school and serve as assistant rector. He teaches at Cranmer Theological House and is the Church History Department Head. Fr. Erlandson also writes a daily Bible devotional, available online or through e-mail subscription, called Give Us This Day. He has written several recent books: Orthodox Anglican Identity, Love Me, Love My Wife, and Take This Cup.
“Fools rush in where angels dare to tread.” – Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism Entering into the virtual (and, I hope, “real life”) debate over whether Anglicanism is Catholic or Protestant seems a little like an illustration of Pope’s epigram. But since I’ve already manifested the foolishness (or is it audacity?) to attempt a…
The Church is the House of God The Church is not only the Body and Bride of Christ: it’s also the House of God and the place where God lives![1] Throughout the Bible, God builds His house (or Temple), the place where He intends to live with man. In the beginning, God’s house was in…
I have come, in my Tracts, to a discussion of the Church.[1] Having first talked about the Anglican interpretation of Scripture (Tract 9), as well as how the Bible and the Church relate (Tract 10), we may now proceed to use the Scriptures as our foundation for elaborating on Anglican theology and spirituality in every…
Thank you, Steven McGregor, for taking the time to read and review my Orthodox Anglican Identity, for caring about Anglicanism, and for challenging me to think even more deeply about our beloved Anglican tradition. I’m glad to see that Steven has picked up on the structure of the book, as well as some of its…
“Among the surviving wills it has been found that 45 per cent of testators in fifteenth-century Norwich made such a provision [leaving a bequest to a monastery]. In London it was 36 per cent, and in York about 33 per cent.”[1] The quotation above, when I first read it in Volume III of Kenneth-Hylson-Smith’s Christianity…
While some of my Tracts for the Times 2.0 have been more academic (especially the ones on English church history), my goal in the Tracts on Anglican spirituality is, at least in part, to provide brief but substantial works on topics essential to an understanding of Anglican spirituality. While much of the material in these…
Introduction My plan is to discuss in order the elements of Anglican Spirituality that I presented in Tracts 7 and 8, beginning with Holy Baptism. However, it occurs to me that to lay a foundation for a discussion of baptism, I should first offer a discussion of Anglican biblical interpretation. Not only is such a…
In Tract 7, I outlined both a skeleton of Anglican spirituality (that the Prayer Book is the Anglican Rule of Life) and enfleshed this skeleton (by providing a list of characteristics of Anglican Prayer Book spirituality). In Tract 8, I will provide both a diagram for how all the parts of Anglican spirituality fit together…
Today, after taking an excursus into the ideals of Anglican parochial and higher education, I want to return in the months ahead to laying out a comprehensive vision of Anglican spirituality. In Tract 4, I defined and discussed Christian spirituality in general, and now I want to extend that definition in a more specifically Anglican…
The Need for Anglican Universities Martin Luther allegedly once said: “If I believed the world were to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.” And so, in spite of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, I’m planting the idea of the Anglican university today. If the church is to create and sustain her own faithful…
