What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 3

     Before we can fully comprehend what happens the moment we die, we must understand what death is and what it is not.  Why do we die?  Those who reject or ignore the Bible contend that death is a natural part of life (as irrational as that may sound).  They consider death OK for old people, but tragic and unfair for the young. The book of Genesis reveals that life as God intended (nephesh, psuche) did not include death. The Biblical revelation is that death is not a natural part of life, but the result of a treasonous crime against a rightful Sovereign.  None of us knows where or when we will die, and that is certainly a great mercy. But God has revealed in his Word why we will die.

“The nephesh that sins shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

In our Western mythology of afterlife, we tend to interpret “sin” in terms of Pythagorean ethics (see Part 2 of this series). Sin is moral or ethical failure. Sin is inversely correlated with heaven; more bad deeds than good deeds earns for us hell; more good deeds than bad means we can be rewarded with heaven. This reward and punishment way of thinking about afterlife has made atheists of many parents crushed by the cold hand of death upon an infant who never got the chance to make a moral or immoral decision. Death hardly ever seems a natural part of life when the corpse is a child or a young adult struck down in the prime of life with a ravaging, painful disease.  Inevitably everybody is confronted with the question of why bad things, especially death, happen to good people.  What about those hundreds of thousands of people killed by the tsunami in Myanmar?  What about 13 million Russians slaughtered by Stalin?  If there is a God, why does he allow such atrocities to occur?  Either God is not good, or he is not all-powerful.  The logical mind insists God can’t be both. If God is good, he must not be all-powerful else he would have prevented such massive cruelty.  If God is all powerful, he must not be good because he could have stopped it and didn’t.

     Jesus’ disciples raised this very question one day (see Luke 13:1ff).  Apparently Pilate had ordered his troops to kill some Jews while offering their sacrifices in the Temple. By implication, the sacrifice had expiated their sin. So, Jews were outraged and confused about how God could allow such a thing.  Jesus’ answer is chilling.

Do you think those people were any worse than the 18 people crushed to death when the Siloam Tower collapsed? Here’s the truth of the matter: unless you deal with your sin problem, you will all perish like them. (Luke 13:2-4)

Jesus isn’t confused about God’s goodness or power.  It is precisely because God is good and all-powerful that God is completely justified in taking life. Just because we don’t take sin all that seriously doesn’t mean that God will easily dismiss it.  All death is God’s judgment against sin.  Jesus isn’t embarrassed by God’s ways. He doesn’t make excuses.  Jesus doesn’t question the Creator-King’s right to do with his creation what he will.  Jesus says, the irrationality of death is your problem, too, if you have rebelled against God.

     It seems to me that when the cynic raises his fist at God and demands, “How could a good and all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to innocent people,” the unbeliever is acting out of an unspoken assumption that things shouldn’t be this way. What way should they be? When is death ever timely?  In Romans 1, Paul writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that God has implanted in every soul the inherent knowledge that there is an all-powerful God.  The irrational expectation that the cosmos should be fair I think is evidence of this primeval awareness of a higher dominion and accountability, something the Bible calls the “image of God.”  Don’t think of mirrors.  Think of an engraved image on a coin.   In the same way a coin bears the image of the authority who made it and to whom the coin belongs, people were created to bear the stamp of their Creator. But a massive rebellion has gripped the world God made.  People (me included, me especially) ignore and contradict the Creator’s will, wishing to live as if we belonged to no one but ourselves, hoping that the world should operate according to our whims.  The Bible view of reality is very different.  All have rebelled and squandered the life God intended (Romans 3:23).  It’s a fatal flaw in our existence, to be fickle and faithless and forever preoccupied with ourselves.

     Religion is the invention of flawed humans to create myths and systems that attempt to undo the damage of our self-centered propensity, make God less angry with us, and thereby earn our heavenly reward.  Every civilization in history was grounded in religious myths of expiation.  Even the descendants of Abraham to whom God revealed the one and only way to end individual rebellion, ignored the way God had saved Abraham. The Jews asked God to give them a group plan by which they could do something.  God gave Moses the step-by-step dos and don’ts of attaining the life God intended, hoping they would see the utter impossibility of the task. Moses hadn’t even brought the tablets down from the mountain before Israel was dancing around a golden calf, breaking rule #1 of the law covenant.  But that didn’t stop the priests from working out a religion based on Pythagorean salvation. They took elements of God’s holy demands and from them concocted a system that re-defined everything.  Judaism was about keeping the moral and ethical Law.  It didn't matter that you couldn't obey the Law.  You could offset your wrong choices and impure thoughts by doing religious things, adding to the positive side of the moral ledger and proving your good intent to whomever you meet at heaven’s gate.  Jump ahead a millennium or two.  When the medieval Roman Church read the Old Testament through Aristotelian spectacles, they concluded this merit-based morality was the path to God.  Of course in such a religion there can never be any assurance that you will get to heaven the moment you die because you may have sinned and not even known it.  You hope and pray that when you are about to die, or if you have just died and your soul may still be floating around nearby, the priest has time to give you Holy Unction (last rites), the one last religious good you do to prove yourself deserving of heaven.

     Jesus taught nothing like this because he rejected the Jewish religious idea of sin as ritualistic or moral.  He intentionally flaunted the ceremonial and moral code of his Jewish contemporaries. He intentionally violated the two most sacred taboos of his culture, saying his body was the true Temple (John 2:13-21) and the Sabbath was his in which to work (Matthew 12:8).  Jesus forced religious people to deal with the fact that God is not made in their image and is no respecter of their religious traditions. Sin is not merely what we do or fail to do.  Sin is existential; it’s something we are that overflows into our daily behavior. Jesus’ mission was not to make morally bad people good enough to go to heaven when they die. Jesus came to provide amnesty for rebels according to the plan God had revealed to Abraham enabling them to live the life God originally intended.

     Religious people use the word salvation to talk about God’s amnesty plan.  Jesus knew that he was Israel’s Messiah, the promised deliverer foretold by the prophets.  He appears to have been the first rabbi to understand that the Suffering Servant of Isaiah was Messiah.  He would be Lamb of God sacrificed for sin. He would stand in for a group of people and take upon his own body the wrath of God and the punishment for their rebellion. This group was made up of Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and freemen.   Jesus read the Old Testament very differently than the way it was being prostituted by the priests of his day.  Jesus trusted the promises of God that his body would not see decay (Psalm 2), but that God would vindicate him as God’s Anointed Savior by raising him from the dead, thereby fulfilling God’s unbreakable contracts with Abraham and David. These people for whom Jesus died, who are they? What did they do to deserve such special treatment? Who are these the New Testament says are “in Christ,” no longer condemned, no longer hell-bound, no longer God’s enemies, in spite of the fact that they continue to lapse back into their rebel ways?

                The Bible says these folks were chosen by God before the creation (John 17:24, Ephesians 1:4). The amnesty plan would not immune them from rebellion all at once, but would be completed in a series of stages.  The first stage is regeneration through the Word of God; they hear the Gospel and faith is created as a gift of God.  From God’s perspective, they suffer death to self and receive the Spirit of the resurrected Christ. Their old nephesh-psuche is regenerated and their eternal life begins, this gift of faith delivering them from God’s judgment and from his ultimate death penalty (John 5:24). Their destiny is assured. Nothing can undo God’s purpose for them (John 10:28-29).  Because they are in Christ, when God looks on them, he does not see their rebellion, but only the merits of Jesus.  The second stage is the work of the Holy Spirit to deliver them from rebel habits of thinking and acting individually and to re-orient their social and political life to gathering with others who are in Christ and learning about the Law God is writing on their hearts. Their eternal life has already started,  Born again of the Spirit, they cannot be unborn. The final stage of amnesty begins the moment we die. At stage one we were saved from the penalty of sin; at stage two, the power of sin; at stage three, the presence of sin.

                Now this is all just too bizarre for those who are not in Christ. That is the primary way they know if they are included in this rag-tag bunch of people for whom Jesus died, was raised, and now intercedes. Paul says that instead of being covered in Christ's spirit, they are covered only "in flesh."  The amnesty plan means nothing to them. They are not interested in it at all (1 Cor. 1:18-25). But those God foreknew and chose 5 billion + years ago (many of whom do not even know it) find themselves drawn to Christ, have a life history that is such that upon hearing God’s amnesty proclaimed from the Scriptures, something deep within them changes and life becomes totally new (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). But how do we know this isn’t all just one more mythology told by Reformers of the Pythagorean Church? How does all this work in real space and time and not just in the pages of some holy book or in the mind of a clever theologian.  How does it get applied?  If we are going to answer the question, “What happens the moment we die?” we need to examine our assumptions about time and space.  And that’s where we turn next.

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 2

     We think we know who we are. It’s assumed in the question, “What happens to you when you die?”  Who are you?  What are you?  The naturalist says you are essentially stardust, an organism made out of carbon and water mostly with a lot of other trace elements thrown in for good measure, and like everything else on earth, the moment you die you cease to exist. Decomposition begins, and, atom by atom, you disappear back into the material world.

     Essentially, this is the oldest Biblical answer of what happens when you die. You become a corpse. The ancient meaning of the Hebrew word, nephesh (often translated soul), was corpse or even tomb (Numbers 5:2, 6:6, 9:6, 10, 19:13, Leviticus 19:28, 22:4, Haggai 2:13).  Nephesh comes from a root meaning "to blow out" or "exhale."  Ancient people saw death as a respiratory phenomenon; that is, when people exhaled their last breath but did not inhale, they knew they were dead. They reasoned that the difference between someone alive and dead was the “breath of nephesh” that the Creator breathed into Adam when he became a “living nephesh” (Genesis 2).  The Old Testament is more likely to use the word nephesh to mean “life” rather than the medieval notion of soul as a non-material eternal self that we have become used to. The word denoted the totality of an individual’s existence. C.S. Lewis summarized the Old Testament view of nephesh when he wrote, “Man doesn’t have a soul; he is a soul that has a body.” Nowhere in the Old Testament is nephesh considered something that can be separated from flesh or mind or emotion.  The Israelis of the Old Testament and even into the time of Jesus conceived of man as a unity. In Deuteronomy 6:5, the great creed of Judaism, people are commanded to love Yahweh God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. This did not mean they conceived of Man as made of four distinct parts. This verse makes use of parallelism to broaden a concept, a literary device used throughout the Bible and especially in the Psalms.  Heart and mind were the internal aspect of love. “Soul” and strength were the external manifestations of love.  Psuche is life. 

     Most of us were introduced to Pythagoras in Junior High geometry.  But this ancient Greek was probably the very first to theorize the immortality of the soul and its transmigration after death into another realm. Up until Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the Greek etymology of psuche was identical to that of the Hebrew nephesh; it was the breath that distinguished a corpse from a living being.  But in his work on ethics, Pythagoras reasoned that psuche was different from the body (soma). The body would die. But your psuche was the real “you” that would leave the body at death and begin an afterlife either in the underworld or someplace better, depending on how ethically you had lived your life.  Here is the origin of our Western ideas of the immortality of the soul. How many Christians would be surprised to learn that their idea of the soul going to heaven after while their body rots in the grave is not Biblical, but Pythagorean?

     In the second century after Jesus these ideas found their way into the church.  Called Gnosticism, it was the non-Biblical teaching that matter was bad and spirit was good; that the purpose of salvation was to free the soul at death to return to God. Pythagorean-Gnostic ideas were beginning to be advanced as early as mid first century when the Apostle Paul was preaching the Gospel in Greece. To avoid misunderstanding, the Apostle Paul hardly ever uses the word psuche in his letters.  He wanted to avoid confusing the Biblical view of personhood with that of the pagan Greeks. The Greek idea of soul immortality and the inherent evil of flesh was brought into the Roman Church by Thomas Aquinas who thought Aristotle and Plato were Christians before Jesus. Not only did we live in Aristotle’s three-story universe, but the Church insisted people were a trichotomous amalgam of body, mind, and soul.  After 19 centuries, these notions are baked into our language and our cultural heritage, preserved in hymns and prayer books, and affirmed in secular media from Dante’s Inferno to Hollywood’s latest Gnostic tale of disembodied spirits escaping to heaven after death.  

    What did our Lord teach?  We must listen to Jesus and interpret the Old Testament through him and the faithfulness of the early Church to him.  Jesus affirmed the Scriptures and the indivisibility of human life. Psuche is the life God gave us.   Jesus speaks in Mark 10:45 that his life mission is “to give his psuche as a ransom for many.”  Obviously, Jesus doesn't have a disembodied essence in mind, but his life. In Mark 8 Jesus begins to teach his disciples that he must be rejected and crucified by God’s people.  When Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from such thoughts, Jesus rebukes Peter and makes a statement found in all four Gospels.

“He who would save his psuche will lose it; but he who loses his psuche will save it.”

                                                                                (Mark 8:36, Mt. 10:39, Lk 17:33, Jn 12:25)

Jesus clearly means one's life.   Losing my immortal soul is impossible in that Pythagorean way of thinking. 

      The only saying of Jesus that is sometimes cited as evidence of his teaching about a body-soul dichotomy is Matthew 10:28.

“Do not fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the psuche. Rather fear him who can destroy both psuche and soma in Gehenna (the garbage dump of Jerusalem).”

Through Pythagorean spectacles we might read this and think he is splitting soul and body.  But if you read it carefully and take psuche to mean in this verse what it means everywhere else in the teachings of Jesus and the Old Testament, psuche and soma are bound together.  From a human perspective, people can kill the body but they can’t kill the life God intended for you when he created you. In other words, you were made for something beyond this life.  You aren’t a body that has a soul; you are a soul that has a body.  There is no teaching anywhere in the Bible about disembodied human souls.  When Jesus loses his psuche, God will raise him bodily from the dead, uniting forever psuche and soma.

    So let me summarize. Who are you?  You are a living psuche.  Jesus corrected the ancient Jewish idea of annihilation after death both in his teaching and by his resurrection. Psuche is your individual life as God intended and which you can save by sacrificing it or lose by grabbing for it.  Changing our ideas about psuche must necessarily impact how we understand the Bible’s message about salvation.

     What happens the moment you die? In Christ, you are saved. And to that we turn in the next part.

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 1

     Recently I got involved in an email discussion regarding the human soul. My word study on the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche evoked questions and even some accusations that I did not share the prevailing view of my Christian friends, several of whom are trained Bible teachers. One wanted to know what I thought happened the moment I die. And as I thought about this, I realized how different is the Biblical answer from the Christian mythology that now parades as orthodoxy in many circles. Having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I have done a lot of thinking about this subject and, more importantly, I have carefully examined the Word of God for what it may actually tell us; no, reveal to us, about our entrance into eternity.  Embarking on this study, I soon realized that my answer would involve not only re-examining the Biblical concept of “soul,” but would necessitate confronting medieval notions of cosmology as well as our view of time and space. In other words, it’s complicated, not because God made it complex, but because people have clung to the detritus of idolatry and sought to justify religious speculations with obscure proof-texts from the Bible taken out of their historical and literary context to serve a cultural religious myth.

     The myth goes something like this. When you die, your soul is released from the body and you find yourself either in heaven or in hell, depending on whether the good you did outweighed the bad and evil in your life. This is the general Western view. People who are more than nominally Christian say your final destination depends whether you believed the gospel of Jesus.  Believers go to heaven, a place of reunion with other dead souls, our family and friends; unbelievers are consigned to purgatory, a kind of time-out, or sent directly to hell, a place of eternal torture and ultimate destruction.  If during your life you believed the right things about Jesus, you go to heaven the moment after you die; if you rejected Jesus, you might get a second chance if you're friendly with the Roman Church, or otherwise, you suffer in hell forever, or maybe you simply cease to exist.  Some Christians, wishing to preserve a place for the Biblical doctrine of resurrection of the body, believe the believer's soul will be reunited with a resurrected body either at something called “the Rapture” or at the second coming of Jesus. In the meantime, we sleep in God’s loving care.

     Now, the odd thing is, there are texts in the Bible that can be used to justify all of these ideas. So, is the Bible contradicting itself? Can we even know what happens the moment we die? Did we become believers primarily because we wanted to go to heaven the moment we die? That was the reason I remember responding to my first altar call at a youth rally. The evangelist had painted this horrible picture of hell that awaited the unprepared soul. He told a story of a boy rejecting an altar call on Sunday and later that week was killed, his life snuffed out before accepting Christ, and now tortured forever by Satan and his demons in hell. Yikes!! As a 12 year old even I knew I needed my fire insurance. So up to the altar I went and joined a lot of other teens pleading for God to forgive their sins and not to kill them.

     After nearly 30 years of ministry and Bible study, learning Hebrew and Greek, schooled in the theology of the early church and the Reformation, my position was the myth of “soul sleep.”  As recently as a year or two ago, I would have answered that the moment I die my essential self (soul) is put into a kind of spiritual holding pattern until the Second Coming of Christ when I am somehow reconstituted as a new, eternal being in the New Heaven and New Earth. I pointed out the New Testament texts where Jesus said to Jairus that his daughter wasn’t dead, but only sleeping; or where Paul in his wonderful description of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 12 talks about those who are asleep being awakened by the Lord at his coming.

     I call these ideas myths. A myth isn’t necessarily a lie; it is a story told with elements we do understand to help us explain stuff we don’t understand. Myths are stories in which values are personified, interact, and spell out moral duty. The problem is we mistake our myths for truth because we don’t know what we don’t know (better read that last sentence again).  We think we know what words mean. We think we understand the late Bronze Age of King David or the Israelite theocracy of 2000 years ago.  We think we know what time it is. We think we know where we are. We think we know what happens after death because someone we know saw a deathbed vision (My great grandfather said he could see the heavenly Jerusalem) or we read a book about coming back from the dead (floating above my corpse, tunnel of light, reuniting with loved ones, etc. etc.).

     For those of us who accept the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the Word of God, we at least have some touchstones of truth in understanding our life journey.  But the fact is: God’s Word on afterlife is a progressive revelation.  That means, for a reason known only to God, he allowed the cultural beliefs of ancient people to be recorded as holy writ. The picture of life after death for the vast majority of Biblical time was the notion of Sheol, a word meaning the pit. Originally the idea was that a person’s destiny was the hole in the ground.  Eternal life was your children taking the faith of their ancestors into the future. Probably during the Exile (587-520BC) Persian notions of afterlife began to seep into the Hebrew mind and writings. Sheol became a place of shadowy existence, a kind of eerie ghostly experience.  The point is: it's tricky business to proof-text these ideas without a context.

     In Jesus day, people who knew the Bible the best had lots of disagreements about what happened the moment you die. Sadducees, the ruling elite, held to the ancient idea of no afterlife. The Pharisees and Essenes believed in a life after death. We don't know the dating of Job, but at least according to the canonical order of things, Job first introduced the notion of resurrection. The prophets developed the idea that there would be a resurrection of the faithful when Israel’s Messiah would be declared King of the world.   

“I know that my Redeemer lives and he will stand upon the earth at Last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body** I will see God.”  (Job 19:25) (**The Hebrew is muddled here and could be translated "without my body.")

     And that brings me to the problem with Bible translations. Every translation is an interpretation. I don’t mean to sound like an elitist, but if you cannot read Hebrew or Greek and have no background in those cultures, you are at the mercy of what translators think a text means.  In our email exchange about the meaning of soul, one fellow copied and pasted a whole list of texts containing the word soul and then proceeded to correct my viewpoint. Of course, what he did not know (remember, we don’t know what we don’t know) was that there are different Hebrew words for soul and different ideas of it, depending on when the text was written. God doesn’t spell out resurrection in the Genesis. But Bibles have to be sold to people, and while some translators have enough integrity to provide notes on alternate readings and meanings, not all do. 

     Here's an example. One of the favorite Scriptures cited by those who believe the “go-to-heaven-immediately-after-we-die” myth is Jesus’ word to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). They lift the word paradise out of any historical context and just assume it means heaven. They also presume that, like our own language, ancient Greek manuscripts had punctuation and don’t realize that ancient texts were just a series of capital letters without even spaces between words. So, the verse could be just as easily translated: “Jesus said, “Today I assure you, you will be with me in the pleasure garden (that’s what the Persian word for paradise meant).”  Why did Jesus say “paradise” and not heaven?

     Translators, marketing to both students of Scripture and people who know nothing about the ancient world, try to make sense of texts in light of what most people already think they know.  So, instead of a clumsy concept like Sheol, the translator uses “hell.” Peter never said Jesus preached to the souls in hell. The place name is Tarturus. What in the heck is that? So, if you only read translations of the texts you’re bound to get confused.

     Let's muddy the waters even more. Combine that with the medieval Catholic Church that bought hook-line-and-sinker into the pagan cosmology of Greek philosophy. In his treatise De Anima (On the Soul) Aristotle taught the immortality of the soul as opposed to the mortality of the body. Thomas Aquinas (beatified by the Roman Church) plagiarized Aristotle and in Question 75 of his Summa Theologica made the pagan idea into Christian orthodoxy. The Roman Church re-defined or re-packaged the Biblical story in this Greek wrapper and firmly implanted the Aristotelian cosmology in the Western mind. Heaven was up and far away. Hell was down. Earth was in the middle. Our sojourn on Earth was to determine where we went the moment we died – up to heaven away from this awful, sinful world, or down to hell, where we were beyond hope, or maybe to something called the Pergatorium, the room off to the side of the Roman banquet hall where you would go and make yourself throw up (purge) so you could come back and eat some more.  Weird, huh?

     So, this is is the mishmash we have inherited: a view of the world and our place in it that is completely at odds with how Jesus and his Jewish ancestors thought and spoke. We use the ancient texts but disregard the Aristotelian spectacles through which we read them.  Remember when Galileo's telescope led him to state that the sun did not revolve around the earth. The Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy and threatened his immortal soul with damnation because the Bible said the sun went around the earth.  Galileo recanted, but his insights were true.  In our time we are undergoing a radical change in what we know about space and time.  The medieval cosmology not only crumbles but is shown to be a hoax of the first order.  Medieval notions of soul, hell, and heaven will not survive the onslaught of truth as God allows people a deeper look into the mystery of creation. 

The History and Future of Anglo-Catholics (Part 3)

     In 2006 the largest Episcopal Church in the United States was not located in New England or California, but in the Diocese of Dallas, Texas. Christ Church Plano had more people in worship on an average Sunday than many Episcopal Dioceses in the country.  Christ Church Plano is an evangelical congregation with nearly 2,500 in Sunday attendance. It adheres to the 39 Articles as its statement of faith. After the General Convention of 2006, Christ Church approached Bishop James Stanton, Bishop of Dallas, and told him they were leaving The Episcopal Church (TEC). Stanton, a friend of evangelicals, worked out an amicable arrangement for the congregation to buy its building, pay its apportionments and wished them well.  Christ Church initially made a connection with the Church of Nigeria. The Anglican Communion worldwide is made up of over 32 million people. It is a very robust and growing Church. It is also a very Protestant Church and bishops from around the globe were outraged at the behavior of TEC in 2006. Some (not necessarily Anglo-Catholic) did not support the presence of a female “archbishop” in their consultations. But the more serious issue was the abandonment of the Scripture as evidenced by the authorization of homosexual ordination. Over the course of months many of these evangelical national churches outside the United States started making allowance for dissenting evangelical and orthodox congregations who were leaving the TEC to unite with them, thus preserving their ties with the Anglican Communion. Old notions of geographic boundaries to a diocese or a province became irrelevant. Thus began the Anglican Realignment. TEC harshly and energetically pursued these congregations and the four bishops who took their dioceses out of TEC.  In 2008 all the various constituent churches and bishops formed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as a new Province for the United States and Canada.  Christ Church Plano affiliated with ACNA as have approximately 1,000 congregations and ministries in 21 dioceses with a membership of well over 100,000 people. Christ Church alone The ACNA has a goal of planting 1,000 new churches before 2014.

     Forty miles west of Christ Church Plano is the Diocese of Fort Worth, a bastion of Anglo-Catholicism, struggling to hold on to the declining number of churches it already has. The diocese is led by Bishop Jack Iker, SSC.  Iker graduated from General Theological Seminary in New York City but now serves on the Board of Directors for Nashota House.  Respected by evangelicals for his stand against TEC by withdrawing his entire diocese from the apostate denomination, nevertheless Bishop Iker is no friend to Protestant Anglicans in his diocese.  There are no congregations with any evangelical expression in his diocese. Iker has been known to support and encourage priests who have publicly humiliated, harassed and threatened evangelical members who wanted a more balanced expression of historical and world-wide Anglicanism in the church’s life and teaching. This writer served on the staff of one such congregation. Protestant Anglicans in the Fort Worth Diocese learn to keep quiet about their beliefs in light of this de-friending by zealous Anglo-Catholic priests and vestries. Six churches voted not to follow Bishop Iker out of the TEC. They formed a new TEC Diocese of Fort Worth with a new Bishop. Iker has temporarily aligned himself with the Province of the Southern Cone in South America, a member in good standing with the ACNA.

     This schizophrenic Episcopal identity in the Fort Worth Diocese has duplicated itself in several communities in which factions have left Iker-led congregations to start “real Episcopal churches.”  Lawsuits abound. TEC inhibited (removed from office) Bishop Iker and initiated legal proceedings to recover their properties. The merits of the case are not the subject of this paper. However, the Anglo-Catholics under Bishop Iker lost the first round and are now appealing the ruling to the Texas Supreme Court.  Regardless of that decision, the scandal of Christians in court is expected to drag on for years until the final verdict is rendered in the U.S. Supreme Court, depleting church coffers to pay teams of attorneys who, of course, always “remain optimistic” about the outcome.  Meanwhile, churches decline in membership and remain in buildings currently declared the possession of TEC.

     What is the future of Anglo-Catholics? Many Anglo-Catholic parishioners have left the church to join Roman Catholic congregations. Indeed, five of Bishop  Iker’s priests have joined the Roman Catholic church, including his most recent Canon of the Ordinary. At least eight churches have already expressed their intent to take advantage of Pope Benedict’s Episcopal Ordinariate of 2009. This organizational structure will allow Anglo-Catholic priests (and supposedly a bishop) "to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared." When asked about his intent regarding the Ordinariate, Bishop Iker said that decision would be delayed until the question of church property is settled, thus leaving the door open to the possibility. Although ACNA has made provisions for each congregation to own its property and each diocese to establish its own practice regarding the ordination of women, it is clear that Bishop Iker and the Anglo-Catholics will not find a long-term home in the ACNA. ACNA endorses the ordination of women, but more importantly, affirms the 39 Articles as the true expression of Anglican faith. This can only mean that Anglo-Catholics will become even more of a declining fringe group within a rapidly growing, dynamic ACNA. Before totally dying out, the last Anglo-Catholic diocese in the United States, losing influence by its rapidly declining numbers of both members and income, will unite with the Roman Catholic Church and bring to an end nearly 200 years of Anglo-Catholic revisionism in the historic Protestant Anglican church.

The History of the Anglo-Catholics: Part 2

     Anglo-Catholics rode the twin waves of 20^th century modernism and urbanization to prominence in the United States. Their anti-establishment Bohemian criticism of the establishment was initially welcomed into academia long before it invaded churches. From New York (General) and New England (Berkeley) and other Episcopal seminaries, the Social Gospel became as prominent as the Articles of Religion. This allowed young Episcopalians to identify with the down-trodden while at the same time not having to give up their wealth and elite social status.  The growth of cities after the Second World War brought many cultures into closer proximity and Roman Catholic influence was more accepted. Episcopalian priests began to call themselves “father” instead of the more Protestant “Reverend.” As divorce became more accepted in society, Anglo-Catholicism became a popular re-marriage compromise for divorced people and their blended families.

     The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s became the watershed event for 20^th century liberal theology.  Conservatives in all the mainline denominations, believing primarily in individual conversion, were ignored and often ridiculed by the more activist minority who were adopting Liberation Theology, a Marxist re-invention of the Gospel as freeing people from unjust economic, political, and social conditions. First introduced by Roman Catholic radicals in Central and South America, it took root and gained traction with a growing number of Anglo-Catholics. The Bible was not to be taken literally. Sin was conceived as not a personal problem, but an institutional one. Jesus was portrayed as a revolutionary subversive, a teaching completely at odds with Roman doctrine. The Second Vatican Council (1965-68) sought to limit the damage done by these modern, urban myths, but change was in the air. The Mass was no longer to be said in Latin and a new Roman Missal containing the words and rubrics of the mass was ordered.  

     In 1975, largely influenced by the growing acceptance of modern Anglo-Catholic practice, the Episcopalians introduced a new Book of Common Prayer.  The General Convention of 1976 allowed the new Prayer Book to be used as an alternative to the 1928 book and at the same time authorized the ordination of women. Something new was emerging that enraged both the evangelicals and Anglo-Catholic traditionalists.

     The new Prayer Book was adopted in 1979. Churches were forbidden to use the 1928 Prayer Book.  New liturgies in contemporary English replaced the traditional use of “thee,” “thou,” and other arcane phrases.  But the updated language was a minor change in comparison to the theological and organizational changes implemented by the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The name of the church was no longer the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, but The Episcopal Church.  The 39 Articles were demoted to a section at the back of the book called “Historical Documents” where they were promptly ignored.  Baptismal regeneration became the accepted theology (that people were actually saved by the sacrament) rather than the invoking of the Holy Spirit that “the person may be born again” as specified in the 1928 service.  Compare the ordination questions from the 1928 Book with those of its successor.

Bishop. DO you think in your heart, that you are truly called, according to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, and according to the Canons of this Church, to the Order and Ministry of Priesthood?
    Answer. I think it.
    Bishop. Are you persuaded that the Holy Scriptures contain all Doctrine required as necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ? And are you determined, out of the said Scriptures to instruct the people committed to your charge; and to teach nothing, as necessary to eternal salvation, but that which you shall be persuaded may be concluded and proved by the Scripture?
    Answer. I am so persuaded, and have so determined, by God’s grace.

Bishop         My brother, do you believe that you are truly called by God

and his Church to this priesthood?

Answer        I believe I am so called.

Bishop        Do you now in the presence of the Church commit yourself to this trust and responsibility?

Answer     I do.

Bishop     Will you respect and be guided by the pastoral direction and leadership of your bishop?

Answer     I will.

Bishop     Will you be diligent in the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures, and in seeking the knowledge of

such things as may make you a stronger and more able minister of Christ?

Answer     I will.

Bishop     Will you endeavor so to minister the Word of God and the sacraments of the New Covenant, that the reconciling love of Christ may be known and received?

Answer     I will.

     Whereas in the 1928 Book, the Lordship of Jesus Christ was affirmed ahead of anything to do with Church polity and organization, by 1979 Jesus has disappeared and primacy is given to the church, especially bishop. Scripture was demoted from the content of ministry to a place on the priest’s reading list alongside "such other things as may make you a stronger and more able minister of Christ." When the Word of God is finally mentioned in the later Book, it is in the context of Sacraments. Other changes are too numerous to identify here, but the direction of the 1979 Book was to a hyper-sacramental viewpoint inconsistent with the origins of the Church and its Articles of Religion. Having successfully compromised the authority of the Bible in favor of catholic tradition, schism was thought a worse sin than heresy.  Many left the Episcopal Church but the majority of evangelicals decided to stay and effect change within. Like the Anglo-Catholics before them, they organized into supportive communities and tried to recover the orthodoxy of the church. These groups held sway at the General Convention of 1994 in which the church affirmed there was value in the position that women should not be ordained. But by the next Triennial that position was wiped out, declaring "the canons regarding the ordination, licensing, and deployment of women are mandatory and that dioceses noncompliant in 1997 shall give status reports on their progress toward full implementation." Battle lines were being drawn between the three main groups that made up the American Episcopal Church: evangelicals, traditional Anglo-Catholics, and the now majority of Post-biblical inclusivists.  In 2006 the Episcopal Church decided to toss a bomb into the worldwide Anglican Communion, electing the first woman Presiding Bishop and affirming the ordination of openly homosexual individuals.  This began the Great Anglican Realignment.

A History of the Anglo-Catholics: Part 1

     It amazes me that so few Episcopalians know anything about their church’s history. They learn about Henry the 8^th’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 16^th century, but are told precious little about what happened after that and how it continues to impact the organizational and spiritual schizophrenia that has seriously divided the Episcopal Church in America, and will in all likelihood kill Anglican orthodoxy in North Texas.

     The trouble began with King Henry’s sequential polygamy in search of an heir. The Pope would not grant him a divorce from Katherine who had born him only a daughter (Mary), so Henry took over the Church in England. He didn’t just take it over organizationally; he installed himself as Head of the Church. Henry hated the Lutherans in Germany. There was little difference between the earliest Anglican Church and the Roman Church except who was in charge. Cranmer, a Protestant, helped Henry attain his divorce and marry Anne Boleyn. But she produced only a daughter, Elizabeth. Henry got his male heir from Jane Seymour, but after Henry's death, his son, sickly Edward, reigned only a short time and set in motion a struggle not only for political power but control of the Church in England. Mary Tudor was a staunch Roman Catholic. When she came to the throne she burned many Protestants at the stake and attempted to purge England of every Reformer. Upon Mary's death, Elizabeth became Queen, declared the English Church essentially Protestant, confirmed the Thirty Nine Articles as what Anglicans believed, and tried to put an end to the horrible religious pogroms. When Elizabeth died, the pendulum swung back to the Roman Catholic version of things until Cromwell and the Presbyterians took control, beheaded King Charles, and established a republic in England. This was the bloody English Civil War that raged for nine horrible years. Cromwell and the Parliamentarians lost to the royalists and the monarchy was re-instituted under Charles the Second. By this time, people were worn out with religious wars. There followed a period of time from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century when the Church in England just wanted to rest.

     But rest soon turned to lethargy and corruption. The Church of England under the Georges became less and less relevant to the times. The Church became the place for the nobility to send their second sons. Their first-born became lords and warriors while their second-born sons went to serve the church. Spirituality was replaced with dull, elitist cultural conservatism. Sermons were abstract and academic. Only the aristocracy was encouraged to attend church out of a sense of duty. The working people were looked down on, shunned and made very unwelcome. Out of this rigid class morass emerged a renewal movement in the 1740’s, a movement for ordinary folks centered on Bible study and dynamic preaching, and the very non-English emotional enthusiasm to reach people with the good news of Christ. They were called the evangelicals. The early leader of the movement was John Wesley, an Anglican priest, who ironically came from Oxford where he was a teacher. The evangelicals started Sunday Schools to help teach children from the slums and city how to read and write, a scandal among the high-brow Anglicans. But it was from Oxford that some of the traditional elitists decided to launch their own renewal movement in reaction to the rise of evangelicals and their success among the working class. Known as the Oxford movement, they wanted to reunify with the Roman Church. This would allow them to preserve the elite, medieval position of bishop and priest and at the same time demonstrate a vigorous piety. They called themselves Anglo-Catholics, teaching that the English Church was one third of the Holy Catholic Church along with the Roman and Eastern Orthodox branches.  The evangelicals called them Episcopalians, the name by which they officially identified themselves in the American colonies when the Revolutionary War forced their separation from the Church of England.

     The Anglo-Catholics began the work of undoing the growing Protestant identity of the Anglican Church.  John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey wrote and distributed pamphlets and books. They wrote 90 tracts in all and were also known as the Tractarians. But the last tract Newman penned in 1841 evoked the wrath of his bishop when he contended that the Thirty Nine Articles were completely compatible with the teaching of the Roman Church. Well, that was just a bit too much over the top. Newman ‘fessed up and left the Anglican Church and became a priest in the Roman Church. The Tractarian movement was strongly felt in the United States with the establishment of Nashota House Seminary near Milwaukee in 1842. Because Tractarians could not often get placements in churches, they began working in the slums of cities and began a critique of bourgeoisie values they associated with the mainline denomination.

     In 1855 a new group took over the propagation of Anglo-Catholicism. The Society of the Holy Cross (SCC) was begun by Charles Lowder and five other priests who needed a support group in a generally unfriendly Protestant denomination. They secretly practiced a hyper-ritualism that included wearing vestments, frequent celebration of the Mass with intentions, the veneration of Mary and saints, the use of bells, elevating the host, and confession to priests, all of which were anathema to the 39 Articles and had not been practiced in the Church of England for hundreds of years. These activities were severely criticized by the Archbishop of Canterbury and in 1874 were outlawed by Parliament under the leadership of Disraeli.  However, in 1906 that law was repealed, largely owing to the positive public relations of the humanitarian efforts of Anglo-Catholic priests in the cities and slums. This work was part and parcel of the Anglo-Catholic’s belief in the necessity of works to be counted righteous.

      But perhaps the most endearing legacy of the Anglo-Catholics to the modern Episcopal Church and that which accounts in large part for its decline and its upcoming demise is the elevation of tradition above Scripture as the authority for the Church. Roman teaching is that the Bible is the product of the Church, thereby making Church Councils pre-eminent to Scripture. Episcopalians in the 50’s and 60’s (today’s cradle Episcopalians) were told the myth of the three-legged stool (still found on the TEC website today). The Church, it was said, was governed by three authorities: reason, Scripture, and tradition. Methodists added the fourth leg: experience. Richard Hooker, who first used the three-legged stool analogy in the 15^th century, was referring to a milking stool, common in that time. A milking stool had one leg longer than the other two. In Harper’s illustration, the Scriptures were pre-eminent over all matters of church and faith. Where the Scriptures were silent, tradition could be consulted with the help of reason. But by the time of the cultural revolution of the 60’s and early 70’s, the stool analogy was misappropriated and misquoted by Anglo-Catholics who were gaining a majority position in a Church struggling to find relevancy in the Age of Aquarius.

The First Missionary Journey