In every profession there are words that become overused to the point of exhaustion. In my profession, words like “interface”, “throughput” and “binary” have escaped from their original technical context and now run amok free from the confines of meaning, to be overused by people who have nothing to say.
That leads me to bishop Colin Johnson who, in gracing us with yet more of his pleonastic rambling on the recent general synod, has come up with a word destined to be overused by Anglican clerics everywhere: “ambiguity”. It is the only concrete belief left to the Anglican Church of Canada – the belief that contradictory beliefs can co-exist in the same belief system.
From here:
“The freedom of conscience in the Anglican experience is not only in superficial matters but even as we approach critical doctrinal issues – how we have understood baptism, the Eucharist, the scriptures, the outward and the inward expression of our faith. We have a broad and messy tent. Personally I’d like to clean it up, but I have lived long enough and I have been ordained long enough to know that such a house cleaning is more about me making the church to be what I would be comfortable with. It usually has little to do with how God wants it to be. The Anglican Church is an uncomfortable place for those who cannot deal with ambiguity.
So to be an Anglican, it doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you’re sincere. Do you have to be sincere? Is that part of ambiguity?
You have to be either sincerely ambiguous, or ambiguously sincere. One or the other, possibly both. I hope that clears it up.
Thank you, BallBounces. Certainty is a beautiful thing.
Grace
There was a poll taken a few years ago in the Church of England and it found the 2% of clergy did not believe in God and 16 % were agnostic ,I would think that the numbers would probably be pretty close that here.And we wonder why the church is in the state it is in.
Girls, don’t ever think of marrying that sort, or depending on him for anything.
At least we finally got an honest statement a so-called bishop. We can indeed attend his “church” – notice the small “c” – but we definitely must leave our Bibles at home and perhaps participate in a false “eucharist” – notice the small”e”. However, to .be a Christian we must accept both the authority of Scripture and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. This so-called bishop is definitely NOT a Christian and proves the ACoC is simply a “church of political expediency”.
Has anyone else noticed this from his statement?
“When the vote was taken, a recorded vote as requested under the rules of order, it appeared that the motion had passed but it quickly became apparent that it had achieved more than 2/3 votes among the bishops and laity but failed by one vote among the clergy, 66.23%, just shy of the 66.66% required. A great silence filled the room. There were many tears, there was no elation. People were deeply concerned for each other. A few members left the floor of Synod in their pain.
[…]
Just before General Synod concluded that afternoon, we were informed that the released electronic record contained an error – the General Secretary, a cleric, was noted as casting an affirmative vote the previous evening but mistakenly not counted in the results. With that vote properly counted, the motion to amend the marriage canon had reached the 2/3 level of approval in all three orders and was therefore carried. A great silence filled the room. There were many tears, there was no elation. People were deeply concerned for each other. A few members left the floor of Synod in their pain.”
Wow – apparently a great silence filled the room and some people left “in their pain” after both the original “no” vote, and the re-count “yes” vote. What a laugh.
The homoheretics that run the ACC have been waging a guerilla campaign since 2004 deliberately designed to drive out traditional bible-believing Anglicans and anaesthetize the “mushy middle” into accepting same-sex blessings. Make no mistake: this was all deliberately planned.
Same words in both posts. So that’s who wrote Melania Trump’s speech!
It is remarkable to note that the Bishop makes “conscience” subject, inter alia, to “scripture” – small case. The Holy Scriptures make conscience subject to themselves as the Very Voice of GOD: fully Revealed in GOD The Son, The Living WORD + John 1 + The Revelation of Jesus Christ 19:13.
Such erroneous and dangerous doctrine, in whatever matter is before the Church, places the Bishop in the company of those “Gentiles” of whom Paul speaks
in ch.2 in his Epistle to the Romans; which “shew the work of the Law (inclusive of ch. 1) written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another”. The Anglican Church’s recent radical departure from The WORD of GOD is a faithless exercise in “excusing one another”.
In his April 22, 1521, letter to the Archbishop of Treves – Rome’s appointed Mediator –
a 16c Porter, if one would – just prior to the Diet of Worms’ ‘Conversations’, Luther wrote:
“I consent with all my heart that the Emperor, the Princes, and even the meanest Christian, should examine and judge my works; but on one condition, that they take
The WORD of GOD for their standard.
Men have nothing to do but obey it.
Do no violence to my conscience, which is bound and chained up with The Holy
Scriptures…on them I take my stand.”
In the meantime, the Babylonian Captivity by the Bishops continues.
Speaking of ambiguity, it reminds me of a BBC TV series from the early 1990’s satirising a wishy-washy liberal Anglican cleric preaching a funeral sermon:
“A funeral, of course, makes us think of… death.
Is death a beginning? Or is it an end? Or is it an end of the beginning? Or a beginning of an end? Or is it the beginning of a beginning? Or an end of an ending? Who knows?
Death is, of course, all of these things. Yet… none of these things.”