Tag Archives: Giles Fraser

No Cross, no Christianity

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Giles Fraser is an Anglican clergyman who doesn’t much like evangelicals or Holy Trinity Brompton or any church that is large and successful or Alpha. He thinks that people who have “a personal relationship” with Jesus are creepy.

He reserves a particular dislike, though, for those who believe that Jesus’ death on the cross was a moment of triumph:

Which is why, for the worst sort of Cheesus-loving evangelicals, the cross of Good Friday is actually celebrated as a moment of triumph. This is theologically illiterate. Next week, in the run up to Easter, Christianity goes into existential crisis. It fails.

The disciples run away, unable to cope with the impossible demands placed upon them. The hero they gave up everything to follow is exposed to public ridicule and handed over to Roman execution. And the broken man on the cross begins to fear that God is no longer present.

I suspect what is really rubbing him up the wrong way is that evangelicals believe that, in his time of suffering on the cross, Jesus took upon himself the sins of the whole world – even those of Giles Fraser. He bore the wrath of God the Father for those sins so that we wouldn’t have to, thereby reconciling us to the Father once and for all. How can such a Redemption not be a triumph?

Theological liberals like Giles Fraser don’t like to think about the wrath of God, the innate sinfulness of man and the fact that a holy, just God must punish sin. Theirs is a sub-Christian faith, empty, meaningless, incoherent and worthy of derision.

Without the triumph of the Cross, there is no Christianity.

Anglicans invent a new god: Common Ground

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Giles Fraser doesn’t like the Anglican Covenant because it attempts to define what an Anglican is by asserting what an Anglican must believe. Since being a Christian is defined by what one believes, this doesn’t seem like a particularly unreasonable limitation – but, then, for the anti-Covenant anti-confessional muddled middle ground brigade, Christianity may well not be a prerequisite for Anglicanism.

What is important to Fraser and his ilk is to eschew all things binary – a perversely obtuse eccentricity in the digital age. There must be no Either/Or, no Black or White no certainties, no definitiveness. No truth; instead, let there be Common Ground.

From here:

The reason why the Covenant is such a terrible idea is that it replaces the search for common ground with a fear that the Other is out to get me. It gives the Other a means of my exclusion, and thus turns the Other into the enemy.

The Covenant contains the idea of a two-tier Communion — those who signed up being on the inner tier; those who do not being on the outer tier — which is not quite the ecclesiastical equivalent of outer darkness. The idea that the C of E itself might be in the outer tier makes a nonsense of the whole Covenant idea. Communion with the see of Canterbury has always been the defining feature of what it means to be an Anglican.