All Nations International Church is in Texas and his Grace Bishop George Ofori-Nyadu is the President, founder and presiding bishop. Apparently, Bishop George is a motivational speaker. I’m sure the Anglican Network in Canada could learn a few things from “Lady Juliet and Bishop George”: I certainly felt motivated after watching this:
I get a lot of spam email, so it is just as well I have an excellent spam filter. Nevertheless, the occasional spam email does slip through. Like this one:
Dear Customer David C Jenkins: Sexy dresses Under USD 12.99 and free delivery
What I find troubling about this is that the sender seems to know I am a Canadian Anglican and is catering to my demographics’ taste in men’s clothing accordingly.
In 2008, security considerations didn’t prevent Cheney from visiting Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2012, he cancelled a visit to Canada because of “security concerns”. Oh Canada!
Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled a Canadian speaking appearance due to security concerns sparked by demonstrations during a visit he made to Vancouver last fall, the event promoter said Monday.
Cheney, whom the protesters denounced as a war criminal, was slated to talk about his experiences in office and the current American political situation at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on April 24.
However, Ryan Ruppert, of Spectre Live Corp., said Cheney and his daughter Elizabeth had begged off via their agent.
“After speaking with their security advisers, they changed their mind on coming to the event,” Ruppert said.
“(They) decided it was better for their personal safety they stay out of Canada.”
From here:
On March 13, the Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), will visit General Synod offices to learn about the full communion relationship between the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC).
I could have saved, the Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit the airfare.
Olav, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada have both succumbed to a rampant liberalism which has, by and large, displaced any pretensions they might have once had of being Christian. Consequently, they are losing members, money and credibility: they can’t even afford to have independent synods and are considering sharing office space.
So it’s understandable that they would want coordinate their efforts to flush themselves down the toilet of theological liberalism. It’s not only an act of pious ecumenism, but it’s green – less water.
The British government is diligently fighting against the right of employees to wear a cross on the job. This all started with Nadia Eweida who was suspended by British Airways for wear a cross at work.
This is so absurd that even secular onlookers are aghast:
If I were Nadia Eweida, I would be starting to think that the whole world had gone completely mad. You remember Nadia, the mild-looking BA worker who found herself suspended because she wore a tiny little cross round her neck for work. Everyone took her side, back in 2006. The entire British press was convulsed with indignation. There were debates in the House of Commons.
Rowan Williams, however, exercised his uncanny knack for coming down on the wrong side of an issue by saying that wearing a cross:
had become something “which religious people make and hang on to” as a substitute for true faith.
He made his comments on the day it emerged that the Government is to argue in the European Court that Christians do not have the “right” to wear a cross as a visible manifestation of faith.
And people wonder why the Church of England is becoming irrelevant.
20 years ago Terence Finlay fired James Ferry because he had a homosexual lover. Now, they have reconciled – more because of a change of heart on the part of the archbishop than the priest, it seems.
All this goes to show how much has changed in the Anglican Church of Canada: today homosexual priests are not only welcome, but they often seem to be preferred candidates for vacant positions. I am sure the ACoC views this as a necessary corrective: in actual fact it is more an act of obeisance to the Zeitgeist.
From here:
The two Toronto clergymen are by now so inextricably linked that they’re bound to appear prominently in each other’s obituaries. They know that.
But Terence Finlay and James Ferry do not want a confrontation 20 years ago — one that scandalized the traditional and appalled the progressive in the Anglican Church — to define them.
As of next Sunday, when they participate in a rare public service of personal reconciliation at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Finlay and Ferry hope the relationship will be known for more redeeming reasons.
This is a response to John W Martens’ article, which follows prior articles here and here.
John,
Thanks for the interesting article in response to my last post. We seem to have drifted away from discussing what Rowan Williams’ view of miracles is; perhaps that is not such a bad thing.
I agree that we share the common ground of rejecting the idea that nature or the created universe is all there is: we both believe in the supernatural. It would be rather odd for Christians to believe otherwise, of course.
We seem to have a different understanding of the meaning of God’s immanence and transcendence. You say: “I want to maintain this claim in the context of God’s immanence in, not just transcendence over, nature”. From this, I take it that you believe that God is, in some sense immanent in his creation and transcendent over it. I do too, but, as far as I can see, in a different way to you. You quote Terry Nichols again, who says: “theologically, and even logically, God cannot be completely separate from the created order. If God were “wholly other,” God could not influence the world, nor could the world influence God”. Stating that God is not “wholly other” from his creation has, I believe, the following problems:
If we mean that God is wholly not other than his creation, he is wholly within it and, therefore not transcendent in any sense: he created himself, a notion that is clearly absurd.
If we mean that God is partly other than his creation (transcendent) and partly within it (immanent), then he is divided, an attribute that is impossible for God.
If we mean that God is simultaneously wholly within creation and wholly other than it we have a logical contradiction along the lines of “A and not A are both true”.
Perhaps what you mean by God is not “wholly other” is that he does not hold himself aloof from his creation; I agree with that.
I believe God is transcendent – he exists wholly outside of creation. I think he is immanent in that the universe is a place where he operates or acts but the universe does not contain him.
In the universe, God is a causal agent. Contrary to what Nichols says, I can’t see anything illogical in this: it would be illogical only if the universe was a causally closed system and, as Christians, we have extremely good reasons for supposing it isn’t, one of which I touched on in my first article: the existence of human free-will. For a transcendent God to be a causal agent, he must “intervene”.
Col 1:17 tells us that God is continually acting to sustain the universe, including, presumably, what we think of as its natural laws:
“And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together”
So God is immanent in his creation through his sustaining of it; he is also immanent in special actions – miracles.
God appears in the created order: we may perceive, experience him and know he is with us. I would argue that, being made in God’s image, that part of us which is transcendent is seeing and experiencing beyond nature – the supernatural. God has not become a part of nature so we can experience him, rather we exist partly in supernature so we can experience him.
I would agree that humans usually play “some role in the process” of miracles. I wouldn’t agree, though, that even though God usually works in conjunction with our faith, that he is necessarily limited in his actions by our participation.
Your saying:
“I do see miracles as supernatural causality working within the context of nature, but “it is not the case that God arbitrarily decides to intervene here and not there, now and then””
still puzzles me because I can’t see why God’s intervening “here and not there” must be arbitrary or why “working within the context of nature” would be any less arbitrary. I really can’t fathom what “working within the context of nature” means, since any act of God that causes a change in the material universe is “within the context of nature”.
When you say “I do not think that God’s action through miracles violates the laws of nature” I almost agree. I would rather say that for a miracle to be a miracle, it doesn’t have to violate the laws of nature. If the laws of nature are not true in a necessary sense – as, for example, “two statements that contradict one another cannot both be true” is – and were created along with the material universe, I can think of no particularly convincing reason why he who created them could not violate them if he chose to. The fact that that might offend human sensibilities is hardly a reason to suppose that it is impossible.
On this:
I disagree with your definition in these ways: if “external world” is meant to indicate God’s general absence from the world into which God now and then deigns to act – I want to stress that God is always present and active;
by “external world”, I meant to convey creation and, as noted above, I don’t believe God is aloof from it, but I do believe he is transcendent over it.
On this:
if “immediate agency or the simple volition of God” are meant to indicate that God acts without reference to faith or the relational quality of creation in which human beings also play a part – I want to insist that God is a personal God and even if we cannot understand all of the means or processes by which or for which God acts, God could not act in ways which do not account for the integrity of human relationships with God.
Again, as I noted above, I think God can act without reference to faith and there are numerous Biblical examples of him doing that. I agree that God is a person – well, three persons – but when you say “God could not act in ways which do not account for the integrity of human relationships with God”, I am not sure whether you mean the integrity that exists in man’s relationship to God by virtue of God’s acting through Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross, in which case you might have a point, or whether you mean any relationship with God. Outside of our relationship with God through Christ, I’m not sure you do have a point, since there is no integrity of relationship without Christ.
On this:
Miracles are signs of God’s grace perfecting the natural order and our openness to that grace of God. They are also signs of the perfection which is intended for the natural order and for us, as Paul says in Romans 8:22-23
I agree that miracles can be “signs of the perfection which is intended for the natural order and for us”, but I am not sure that “perfecting the natural order” is something that is happening gradually: I think the groaning will stop after the arrival of the eschaton and it will come with more of a bang.
I have meandered from my initial contention that Rowan Williams doesn’t believe in miracles; it is rumoured that he might have better things to do than straighten out what I think about what he thinks. But I hold to my initial contention that “miracle” is God intervening in his creation.
From here:
A group of Anglican clerics have called on St Paul’s Cathedral to fully explain why praying Christians were dragged by police from the steps of the famous landmark during the eviction of the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp.
Five praying Christians were forcibly removed from the cathedral steps during the operation, despite the fact that an eviction order had only been granted for the land opposite St Paul’s which is owned by the City of London Corporation.
To some degree the Occupy protesters can be excused their incoherent protest against capitalism; the poor benighted souls, brains addled with Marxism and marijuana, could scarcely be expected to know better.
Christians, though, should. Praying on the steps of St. Paul’s was an act of asinine vane posturing; did they think that God wouldn’t be able to hear them from inside?
They should have been the first to be arrested.
From here:
Kingston, Ont., police are asking for the public’s help after a woman allegedly pulled on another woman’s hijab, which police are calling a hate crime assault.
Police said a woman was finishing her grocery shopping at a store around 5 p.m. ET on Jan. 28 when another customer came from behind her and pulled on her hijab.
This opens exciting new vistas for innovative hate crimes: sporran pulling; turban tugging; fez fondling; dislodging busbies with snowballs.
The possibilities are endless.
Humour is a wonderful gift from God. It can be used to puncture the pomposity of self-righteous bombasts and it is particularly satisfying to see it wielded against that most perfect paradigm of pretentious self-righteousness, the Islamist Mullah.
From here:
After a council of Afghan clerics issued restrictive guidelines for women, later embraced by President Hamid Karzai, young Afghans streamed to social media sites to lampoon the rulings, reports BBC Persian’s Tahir Qadiry.
“It’s outrageous,” wrote one young Afghan on his Facebook page.
“The next thing they’ll be saying is that Afghanistan needs to be divided up in two – one half for men and the other half for women.”
This was just one of thousands of comments posted on social media sites by young Afghans this week, after their country’s top religious council said that men and women should not mix at school, work or in other everyday situations.
[…..]
“Ladies, you should not surface on Facebook without a male partner,” wrote Mahnaz Afzal, an Afghan woman currently working in London.
“We have asked the Facebook administrators to create separate profiles for women. You are not allowed to ‘like’ or ‘poke’ someone on Facebook or you will be cursed.”
“Could I please ask the Afghan girls not to comment on my posts unless they have permission from their fathers or husbands or the Ulema council?” one man tweeted.
“Girls are only allowed to access Facebook if they are wearing their burkas!” tweeted another.
