Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 17, 2023
Traditional, orthodox Anglicans are about to meet in Rwanda in order to assess the global situation and further attenuate, perhaps even completely sever, links with the Church of England. One reason is that the African bishops see the West’s attempt to foist this liquefied anthropology upon the global church as yet another act of Western colonialism. As I argued in my last column, LGBTQ-affirming churches are simply doing what the pro-slavery churches of the nineteenth century did: giving specious blessing to the values of the world in which they find themselves. It is depressingly gratifying that Theo Hobson seems to have proved my point with almost indecent haste.

Does the Church of England need evangelicals? The question is now a pressing one, given that the last few months of chaos over the issue of gay marriage seem finally to have done what decades of doctrinal indifferentism and even the advent of women priests failed to achieve: an evangelical rebellion among the Church of England’s most committed evangelical congregations.
Theo Hobson in The Spectator is confident of the answer: No, the C of E does not need evangelicals. To quote his reasoning:
Evangelical dynamism cannot renew the Church as a whole. Its energy is too counter-cultural; it presents Christianity as an identity in sharp contrast to the surrounding culture, it insists that a true Christian is marked out by brave dissent from liberal views on sexual morality…. An established Church cannot foreground such energy.
The argument is interesting: An established national church cannot ultimately oppose the culture of her nation. Some (including myself) would argue that this is precisely why no church should be established, since such politically motivated alliances always have a dominant partner, and history makes it very clear who the dominant partner always is. Hobson’s vision, while short on details, shows no concern for this particular outcome and seems to envisage the church as the rightly submissive handmaiden of the cultural Zeitgeist, existing to offer a religious and liturgical gloss that legitimates the liberal state and whatever its current moral tastes happen to be. In short, the church is there to express in religious idiom the values of the dominant class, in this case urban progressives. Since evangelicals will not do this, they are now surplus to requirements.
Hobson’s article stands in stark contrast to another article published last week at the dissident website UnHerd by the feminist writer Mary Harrington. In “The Death of Christian Privilege,” she raises a far more significant question than Hobson: Does the decline of Christianity also signify the liquefaction of meaning and the descent into the kind of moral chaos into which the West has descended, with its demolition of sexual taboos and its long war against the authority of the body? Her answer is yes, it does.
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Every false religion. cult, and human philosophy, teaches that enough works will result  in salvation, “renewal,” “enlightenment,” or whatever concept they choose as their goal. Some who call themselves Evangelicals are diluting salvation by insisting that works have a part in salvation, but James makes it clear that works are the result of salvation (James 2:14-26), but it is grace alone through faith alone that is the cause.

6 For all of us have become like one who is unclean,And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;And all of us wither like a leaf,And our iniquities, like the wind, carry us away. Isaiah 64:6 (LSB)
We have looked deeply at the Biblical definition of our Salvation over the last several posts. In this post we will continue to do that. One of the attacks on the Gospel in our time comes from several sources, but with the same focus. That focus is to change what our salvation actually is and what it accomplishes and why it is necessary. In many of my posts over the years that this ministry has been online I have bought up the number one false form of salvation that our enemy ensnares so many people into. It is some form of works-righteousness. When I first began this ministry I did a series of posts on Ephesians 2:8-10.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:8-10 (LSB) 
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There is no circumstance in which God has nothing for us to do, no situation in which we cannot be faithful to his calling on our lives. He calls none of us to uselessness and calls none of us to another man’s life or ministry. He calls each of us to be obedient in the context he has ordained for us. For the end of the matter, when all else has been heard, is that we are to simply fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the sacred duty of every man, the kind expectation of a loving God.

We sometimes make the Christian life more complicated than it needs to be and more complicated than it ought to be. For when it comes right down to it, God calls us to nothing more, and nothing less, than to obey. The only thing that really matters in any context or any circumstance is obedience to God’s will as it is revealed in God’s Word. Thus it is always necessary, and never superfluous, to search the Bible to know the mind of God. Thus it is always right, and never wrong, to pray, “Lord, teach me to obey you in this.”
If God calls us to possess great wealth, then he calls us to live with great generosity toward others and great care toward the state of our own souls, knowing that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It falls to us to pray that we would be obediently and faithfully rich.
If God calls us to possess scant wealth, then he calls us to live obediently with reliance upon him and trust in his provision, knowing that the God who clothes the grasses of the fields will much more certainly clothe those whom he loves. It falls to us to pray that we would be obediently and faithfully poor.
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