Episcopalian Declension to Heresy in Sydney, Australia

Evangelicals in the USA have regarded with caution anything Episcopalian because of the serious declension which has occurred in the Episcopalian Church in the USA. Given the parlous state of that denomination in the USA one can only respect the caution.

Perhaps the largest evangelical Episcopalian Diocese in the world, the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church in Australia, if known at all by evangelicals in the USA, has also been looked upon with a little suspicion because .... well, it is Episcopalian. At the very least a 'watch' was put on the Diocese by those who had any interest in goings on here. From the perspective of the Diocese, some twenty years ago or more there were attempts to say to evangelicals in the USA that "we're okay". Evangelical conference attendance in the USA and promotion of the Sydney theological seminary, Moore College, were strategies designed to demonstrate the acceptability of the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese. Leading evangelicals in the USA were invited to speak at conferences here. Underlying everything else the conferences were hoped to achieve was the hope that we could be seen as okay to evangelicals in the USA.

This essay is designed to disprove the notion that all is well in the Episcopalian Church in Sydney, Australia. Things had been better in the past but declension is well under way. The declension has its roots in the teaching of the theological seminary called Moore College over the past twenty to thirty years. In that time a tumour (English spelling) developed and has been left unchecked to this day. Unchecked, it will consume all other doctrines of God which are reformed and evangelical.

The tumour is what is called Theistic Evolution. It is now vigorously defended within the Diocese as a model for the origin of life. The defence goes all the way to the top position of the Diocese and still has refuge within the theological seminary of the Diocese.

Where then is the Episcopalian Church in Sydney, Australia headed? Perhaps a look at the history of the evangelical church in Wales, Great Britain some one hundred years or more ago will provide some insight.

A friend of mine is interested in Revivals. His interest is greater than mine. He recently loaned me a book entitled "The Welsh Revival of 1904" written by Eifion Evans and published by Bryntirion Press. I found it a very sobering summary of the revival which occurred in Wales and to Welsh people in other parts of Great Britain. Of particular interest to my friend was the observation that unlike earlier revivals this revival did not occur with an emphasis on biblical preaching and teaching. It was more a consequence of calling on the Holy Spirit's presence and activity through prayer. The effects of the revival were perhaps not as prolonged or extensive of those that had gone before.

Enough of that, what I want to raise here is the state of the church in Wales prior to and after the revival of 1904.

Eifion Evans observed that, in the years prior to 1904, the emergence of Psychology, Liberalism, Higher Criticism and the influence of Evolutionary Theory affected the doctrine of the churches. Evans writes on page 44, "The sheer intoxication of a new theology which championed so loudly a release from the trammels of traditional orthodoxy blinded many to its utter contingency. Liberal theology was not merely taking away the decorative appurtenances of Christianity, it was demolishing its very foundations." Evans goes on to say "The spiritual bankruptcy of the churches, thus deprived of the very cause and meaning of their existence, was the subject of many complaints before the revival broke out."

Well, the revival occurred and some 59,000 were added to the nonconformist churches in Wales. The Church of England and the Church of Rome figures were unknown. However, of those 59,000 it seems at least 20,000 fell away in later years. It is interesting to then see what Eifion Evans observed in relation to the Calvinistic Methodists after the revival. I will quote Evans from pages 187 to 190 in his sub-heading of Doctrinal Conflict under the chapter headed Militant Aftermath:

"The influence of the 1904 revival was more important in the constitutional history of the Calvinistic Methodists. In the 1920's there was a great deal of discussion within the denomination about the Confession of Faith. The Constitutional Deed of 1826 had been framed to ensure strict adherence to the denomination's doctrinal tenets, and to provide a corresponding legal safeguard for its places of worship. By 1912 there had been an attempt in the courts of the church to secure the framing of a 'Shorter Declaration of Faith', an oblique and indirect criticism of both content and length of the confession being implied. Later the reports of the Reconstruction Commission, which had appeared in the early twenties, strongly urged parliamentary legislation to modify these requirements.

Nantlais Williams, one of the revival's most illustrious converts, was in the vanguard of the opposition to this move. His objections were grounded on the conviction that the advocates of a liberal theology were seeking the legal and doctrinal leverage necessary to take over the denominational machinery and to bring about a radical change in the evangelical nature of its witness.

He maintained that the liberals were agitating for reform purely as a matter of political maneuvre. It was a deceptive strategy on their part to gain power in the courts of the church. They were ecclesiastical cuckoos seeking to gain fraudulent control of the evangelical nest.. Unable to set up their own churches through the impotence of their modernist message, they sought to supplant the churches of the Methodist Fathers, established by evangelical zeal for the 'old' gospel.

Their cry for freedom sounded laudable until Williams observed : 'We are not bound by the law, so much as by the Fathers and their scriptural, evangelical faith.' He exposed their doctrinal dishonesty and moral indifference of their position, for the modernist faith 'did not have enough confidence in itself to venture forth to raise a temple to disseminate it. It must rather endeavour to usurp the right to those buildings put up at the expense of the Confession of Faith ... It will be robbing what rightly belongs to others.'

In the discussion which followed through the columns of the denomination's weekly he further charged the modernists with double-talk, a device which utterly confused the common people. The scriptural and historical content of the most fundamental concepts were being shamelessly debased. There could be no prosperity to the church which thus betrayed the truth. A devaluation of the Christian currency could only lead to disaster. Nor would the ecumenical aspirations which motivated the leaders of the reconstruction movement be best served in an atmosphere of doctrinal fog. The interests of both sides could only benefit by clarity, honesty and charity.

Later, Williams acknowledged that 'it was something received in 1904 which encouraged me to stand so resolutely throughout the debate.' The issue was finally resolved when note was taken of his insistence on the inclusion in the Declaratory Statement of clear affirmations regarding the Deity of Christ, His virgin birth, His atoning death, His literal resurrection on the third day and His second coming. The draft document was modified accordingly, and the 1933 Act of Parliament which remains the law of the church incorporates these determinative truths. In this way the 1904 revival has left an abiding mark on the legal structure of that ecclesiastical body.

In spite of these brave efforts it was a hollow victory for orthodoxy. One result of the reconstruction movement was the drawing up of the long-awaited 'Shorter Declaration of Faith.' In its wake T. Nefyn Williams, a minister who had been disciplined for heterodox views in 1928, was able to seek, and receive, readmission with a clear conscience. In his pamphlet Y Fford yr Edrychaf ar Bethau ( The Way I look at Things), as the title suggests, he rejects the biblical and confessional authority in favour of his own moral consciousness. This subjectivist criterion led him to deny all supernatural elements in the gospel narratives from the virgin birth to the bodily resurrection of Christ. It followed that he ridiculed the biblical concepts of original sin and substitutionary atonement. While his expulsion in in 1928 had been an unavoidable necessity, his restoration in the 1930's - without repentance or retraction - marked the beginning of an epoch.

From being an honest dissenter he became the champion of doctrinal deviationists. They used the 'Shorter Declaration of Faith' to salve their conscience from the demands of the fuller and more explicit confession. If the age of doctrinal confusion had not dawned, when men would use theological terms evacuated of their traditional and biblical meaning, it was enough to take shelter under and all-embracing theological umbrella of general concepts. It was an era of dwindling doctrinal requirements. The disintegration of orthodoxy had become an accomplished fact within at least one of the historic denominations."

Well, the pressures of the world's thinking experienced in the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had its effect on the doctrine of the church. Of course, similar pressures were experienced and succumbed to around the globe but, as a caution to evangelicals in the USA, I bring to attention the declension to heresy occurring within the Episcopalian Church in Sydney. Evangelicals in the USA beware.

A century ago, modernism was the trojan horse used of the Evil One to gain entry into the Church's thinking and undermine the authority vested in the Word of God. Today it is post-modernism used of the Evil One to undermine the authority vested in the Word of God. The constant in both scenes is the offensive notion that the frustration, suffering, disease and death riddled and dead end laced process of evolution was the means used by God in creation. This, in spite of the clear utterance of God in Exodus 20:11 and supported unreservedly in Genesis 1 and Exodus 31:16-18 to the contrary. The beauty, for the purposes of deception, in the post-modernist approach to Scripture is that it affords a 'legitimacy' to a reader to reinterpret the Word of God to what the reader wants. In this situation the reader simply contends he/she is understanding the mind of the author and the original audience. Ultimately, it is the post-modernist reader who is interpreting the passage to his/her conditioned mind, a mind conditioned by the influences of the world or the Evil One.

Post-Modernist thought is as slippery as the 'theory of evolution' and difficult to tie down. Post-Modernists can accuse their opponents of doing the very thing they, themselves, do with Scripture. This was demonstrated by a recent anonymous correspondent to the comments section of this blogspot.

As regards the Episcopalian Church in Sydney it is evident that graduates of the theological seminary of the Diocese are increasingly unwilling to refute Theistic Evolution and some actually promote this view of origins. Thus the tumour is healthy and growing. Who knows what doctrines of the church will come under assault in the future. Will the long established evangelical 'Articles of Religion' of the Episcopalian Church come to be amended and will the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney, Australia play a role in this change? One thing we can be confident of is that declension is occurring concerning belief in the Person of Jesus Christ and His glory in Creation. To the mind of this writer this is a heresy.

Evangelicals in the United States of America beware of what is going on here in Sydney, Australia.

Sam Drucker