At the "Council of Africa" (as Augustine called the Council of Carthage), the catholic church restated what the Bible teaches about human nature. Augustine believed that our love for sin is a consequence of Adam and Eve's original disobedience (the Fall), and that the end result is that all people are spiritually infected, dead in our trespasses and sins, and "by nature children of wrath" (Eph 2). We sin because we are sinners (Original Sin, Rom 5).
Read moreHistorically, the first woman to be ordained an Anglican priest was supposedly done out of wartime necessity to meet the sacramental needs of Anglicans in occupied Hong Kong following the Japanese invasion of China.
Read moreTHE DANIEL DECLARATION
A CALL TO MISSION, A PLACE TO STAND
The empty tomb yields in its remaining contents the evidence of the resurrection, if closely considered. The strips of linen and the burial cloth are not simply discarded items of no significance. They have great bearing on the divine action that took place "early in the morning" in great power and evident calm. "Then Simon Peter ... arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head.
Read moreBesides, and no one claims similar divine inspiration, New Testament writers often give new developmental twists to quotations from the Old.
Read moreStendahl based his then-novel interpretation on the theory that Paul wrote in a patriarchal society, which makes it necessary (in his view) to reevaluate and reinterpret Galatians to make it applicable to "modern, enlightened" times; he differentiates between continually applicable biblical commands and nonbinding, adiaphoric passages, subjectively making one's worldview the determinative factor.
Read moreLegalism orders our lives, and the Pharisees viewed justification as a process of transformation. Whole systems of religion are devised to facilitate our understanding of salvation-by-increments: acquiring grace by participating in the sacraments or modern-day discipleship plans that are meant to lead us towards the goal of obtaining human worthiness to stand before God. Preachers thrive on this.
Read more'Although reformed'? Perhaps nothing so quite indicates the extent to which Nazir-Ali has rejected classical Anglicanism than this statement. Anglicanism is Catholic not in spite of the Reformation: it is Catholic because of the Reformation.
Read moreThe tragic loss of Cranmerian conviction and biblical clarity bequeathed to us by our great Reformer has led to the confusion of faith and practice within the Church of England that has also spread disastrously to the majority of her daughter churches throughout the post-colonial world. The third largest Christian grouping on our globe has lapsed into error and irregularity that results from abandonment of our Reformational heritage.
Read moreIn his replies, Archbishop Runcie, while rehearsing some of the arguments in favour of ordaining women, expressed his inability to prevent any province of the Anglican Communion from acting independently on the issue. Runcie's argument revealed a fault line in the Communion which was to become even more pronounced over other issues such as divorced and remarried clergy, and the ordination to the priesthood and episcopate of those in sexually active homophile relationships.
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