Anglican Bishop Quotes

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.

If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present.

Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen. He shares his feast day, June 22 on the Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop during the English Reformation to maintain his allegiance to the Pope. More was added to the Anglican Churches' calendar of saints in 1980. Source: Wikipedia

King Charles I of England believed in the compromise worked out under Queen Elizabeth – that the Church of Rome had fallen into evil ways, that the English Church was purified Catholicism, and that it was the Anglican bishops, nowadays, who were the true inheritors of the apostles.

When you read between the lines, or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing, a lot of these compatibilists are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total downer otherwise, doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one. Humans “descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known,” said the wife of an Anglican bishop in 1860, when told about Darwin’s novel theory of evolution.[*] One hundred fifty-six years later, Stephen Cave titled a much-discussed June 2016 article in The Atlantic “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will . . . but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.”[*]

Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my [Pentecostal] mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.

It was now clear that no matter how it was done in England, Plymouth played by its own, God-ordained rules, and everyone—Separatist or Anglican—was expected to conform. It seems never to have occurred to the Pilgrims that this was just the kind of intolerant attitude that had forced them to leave England. For them, it was not a question of liberty and freedom—those concepts, so near and dear to their descendants in the following century, were completely alien to their worldview—but rather a question of right and wrong. As far as they were concerned, King James and his bishops were wrong, and they were right, and as long as they had the ability to live as the Bible dictated, they would do so.

It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.

By saying that we were “first Christians, then Anglicans”, my priest seemed to be saying, in so many words, that Anglicanism was just one of the many optional paths up the mountain we call Christianity. Beneath all the talk of liturgy and sacraments and tradition, beneath the bishops and the altars and the stoles, there seemed to be a fundamental conviction that none of it was actually necessary.

As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral. Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith comes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.” She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates. Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.

THE MARTYR AND THE CHAIN. "When Hooper, the blessed martyr, was at the stake, and the officers came to fasten him to it, he cried, 'Let me alone; God that hath called me hither will keep me from stirring; and yet,' said he, upon second thought, ' because I am but flesh and blood, I am willing. Bind me fast, lest I stir.'" John Hooper (1495-1500 – 1555) was an Anglican English Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. An advocate of the English Reformation, he was martyred during the Marian Persecutions. Some plead that they have no need of the holdfasts of an outward profession, and the solemn pledges of the two great ordinances, for the Holy Spirit will keep them faithful; yet surely, like this man of God, they may well accept those cords of love wherewith heavenly wisdom would bind us to the horns of the altar. Our infirmities need all the helps which divine love has devised and we may not be so self-sufficient as to refuse them. Pledges, covenants, and vows of human devising should be used with great caution; but where the Lord ordains, we may proceed without question, our only fear being lest by neglecting them we should despise the command of the Lord, or by relying upon them we should wrest the precept from its proper intent. Whatever will prove a check to us when tempted, or an incentive when commanded, must be of use to us, however strong we may conceive ourselves to be. "Bind the sacrifice with cords, even with cords to the horns of the altar." Lord, cast a fresh band about me every day. Let the constraining love of Jesus hold me faster and faster. "Oh, to grace how great a debtor, Daily I'm constrained to be!  Let that grace, Lord, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to thee.

The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing.

On my first trip to Ghana, my long-time colleague Jude Hama of Scripture Union decided to give me the broadest exposure possible to the movements of the church in his country. We visited with Methodist bishops, Baptist leaders and Pentecostal church leaders whose churches were sending missionaries all over the world. We visited Presbyterians, Anglicans and charismatics. This last church was the most fascinating. The preacher, a man who weighed at least three hundred pounds (although he was only five feet, six inches tall), testified that his physical size was evidence of God's poured-out blessings. As the service progressed, people came and laid their money on the stairs leading up to the stage. At several points, beautifully dressed ladies carrying baskets on their heads would collect the money. And the process would then repeat, and more people would lay more money on the stairs. Jude explained, "These people have a prayer request: a job, an illness, a desire to marry, etc. The money is their `love offering' and is designed to let God know that they are serious about their request." Seed faith expressed in Ghana dollars. Jude went on: "You see, Paul, you in America concentrate on the God of love. But here we want the God of power. When you live in poverty or with some incurable affliction or some injustice, you don't want to feel loved. You want God's power to make you prosper, or to make you healthy or to make you free. And they have been taught and they believe that money is the way to release the power.

As they left, Anglican vicars in the area pinned a notice from their bishop to the front doors of their evacuated churches. Addressed to “our United States allies,” the notice read in part: “This church has stood for several hundred years. Around it has grown a community which has lived in these houses and tilled these fields ever since there was a church. This church, this churchyard in which their loved ones lie at rest; these homes, these fields are as dear to those who have left them as are the homes and graves which you, our Allied, have left behind you. They hope to return one day, as you hope to return to yours, to find them waiting to welcome them home.

I would have liked to believe in God. Now there was something that could have been everything better than anything else. By believing in God, I could succumb to ease and comfort and reassurance. Fearlessness was an option! Eternity was mine! It could all be mine: the awesome pitch of organ pipes, the musings of Anglican bishops. All I had to do was put away my doubts and believe. Whenever I was on the verge of that, I would call myself back from the brink. Keep clarity! I would cry. Hold on to yourself! For the reason the world was so pleasurable, and why I wanted to extend that pleasure through total submission to God, was my thoughts—my reasoned, stubborn, skeptical thoughts—which always unfortunately made quick work of God.

Long-term results are even harder to measure. On one hand we know that in Graham’s meetings, at home and abroad, some people were alienated by the perceived thinness of his theology and irrelevance of his message to the deeper needs of the times. On the other hand, others found the theology clear, direct, and relevant. One Anglican bishop, looking back, likened Graham’s meetings to “divine adrenaline for a jaded church.” And so it was that thirty years later, Queen Elizabeth II invited Graham to join her for dinner on the royal yacht when it was anchored in San Francisco Bay. As he boarded the vessel, a British naval officer, part of a color guard, broke ranks and whispered two words in Graham’s ear. “Wembley, ’55.

Hence Americans never belonged to the religious category who seek certainty of doctrine through clerical hierarchy: during the whole of the colonial period, for instance, not a single Anglican bishop was ever appointed to rule flocks there. What most Americans did belong to was the second category: those who believe that knowledge of God comes direct to them through the study of Holy Writ. They read the Bible for themselves, assiduously, daily. Virtually every humble cabin in Massachusetts colony had its own Bible. Adults read it alone, silently. It was also read aloud among families, as well as in church, during Sunday morning service, which lasted from eight till twelve (there was more Bible-reading in the afternoon). Many families had a regular course of Bible-reading which meant that they covered the entire text of the Old Testament in the course of each year. Every striking episode was familiar to them, and its meaning and significance earnestly discussed; many they knew by heart.

And any way, remember this. I’m a plain ordinary man and no theologian. When I read a book in defence of the Presbyterian Church I don’t think it has a leg to stand on. When I read an attack on it I rise up ready to fight for every word in the Shorter Catechism. I expect this book of yours turned lots of young men to the Church, for we’re all alike, Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. We won’t have our nests fouled by our own species and that’s a fact.

Kill Germans! Kill them!” raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon. “. . . Not for the sake of killing, but to save the world. . . . Kill the good as well as the bad. . . . Kill the young men as well as the old. . . . Kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant [a story then circulating]. . . . I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr.” The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London.

The mufti and the Anglican bishop, together with the city’s rabbis, laid a foundation stone “in the name of Jerusalem