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"LUX MUNDI"
By Canon Chuck Collins
www.virtueonline.org
January 17, 2024
When the first bricks are badly laid, the wall in the end will be wonky. When the church abandons Scripture and the doctrinal formularies of the Edwardian and Elizabethan Settlement and wanders the road of personal preference, the end result is Charles Gore, liberal catholicism, and "Lux Mundi." Charles Gore, the popular Bishop (of Worcester, Birmingham, and Oxford) died January 17, 1932. At its best, the Liberal Catholic Movement wanted to "preserve the best of the past in the light of the best of the present so as to build for the best future" (Frank Gavin), but, in fact it was third-generation Tractarianism that tried to marry Anglo-Catholic ritual with liberal theology and the new biblical criticism of its day.
The end result is a church that reeks high-church niceties with a flimsy sentimental theological underpinning that is more interested in science than biblical revelation. This liberal-catholic ethos has dominated the Church of England ever since (Archbishops Michael Ramsey, Robert Runcie, Rowan Williams, and General and Nashotah House Seminaries).
Gore edited and wrote an essay in the influential "Lux Mundi" (12 essays, all by liberal Anglo-Catholic scholars). The collection was subtitled "a series of studies in the religion of the Incarnation." This movement and this book helped steer the Church of England away from the centrality of the cross/atonement to the Incarnation - from a focus on the Bible as God's divinely inspired word to the Bible subject to the new learnings of science and reason, and from the gospel of proclaimed hope for sinners to a social gospel of Jesus-is-our-example to follow.
Whenever the church moves away from the centrality of Holy Scripture and the delivered faith, whenever it moves from the Cross of Christ (the Atonement) to focus mainly on the life and moral teachings of Christ, it moves away from the God's plan for saving and redeeming all of his creation. If you wonder why the church today is flailing frantically in a big ocean of ideas, it's partly due to this third generation of Tractarianism, the Liberal Catholic Movement. Our hope, of course, is to rediscover the foundational pillars of Reformation Anglicanism that, alone, gives us hope for our future.
Canon Chuck Collins is the author of Reformation Anglicanism: Beautiful, Generous, Beautiful. You can purchase it here: https://www.amazon.com/Reformation-Anglicanism-Biblical-Generous-Beautiful/dp/0986044148
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