Beyond Big Billy

Bill Lawton’s real (if not explicitly argued) insight is that an emphasis on a discontinuous and futurist eschatology has had an impact on the way in which Anglicans from Sydney have responded to the rising tide of secularism since the 1960s – a period which does indeed have some strong echoes of the late 19th century. In between these two eras was the high-water mark of church influence in Australian, and in Sydney especially. In the midst of the Great Depression Sydney Anglicans like the extraordinary Rev R.B.S. Hammond at St Barnabas’ Broadway distinguished themselves in remarkable service of the poor. The 1950s in particular was a time in which Australian society seemed more congenial to the influence of the church than it had previously.

This was demonstrated by the dramatic impact of the Billy Graham crusade of 1959 – an event which had all the appearance of the dawn of a new glorious age of Christian social influence through the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of thousands of people who went forward in Sydney and Melbourne. More than 130,000 people made a commitment to Christ – a figure which represents nearly 2% of the Australian population at the time. Evangelical historian Stuart Piggin makes the case from the figures of the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that there was a drop in alcohol consumption, extra-marital births and crime statistics during that time – signs as far as he is concerned that here was a genuine revival. Yet what looked like the herald of the new day turned out to be the evening star. The Graham crusade, at which a generation of the diocese of Sydney’s future leadership encountered Jesus Christ himself in a profound and life-changing way, coincided with a renewed impetus for secularisation and liberalisation in Australian society.

It would be impossible to understate the scale of the social changes that have occurred in a single generation, and which have direct impact on the church’s relationship with society. Anglicanism carries within its DNA an expectation that it is part of the social order and that it contributes to social cohesion. And yet along with other institutions that played this role in the old Australia, the church’s influence was now under attack. Australia’s development as a society of leisure had a lot to do with it – whereas once the churches were the hub of the local community’s social life, there were now many alternative way to make use of the freedom afforded by Sunday. The sexual liberation and the rise of feminism have been well-documented to the point of cliché. Successively, the churches failed to halt changes to laws providing for Sunday trading, no-fault divorce, later pub closing times, more gambling and casinos, the right abortion, rights for de facto marriages, homosexual practice and the removal of censorship. Whereas once the local media took a respectful interest in church affairs and sought the opinion of the clergy, it now could and wanted to tell a different story: of the decline and fall of a once mighty and vibrant institution. Attendance at church dropped away; though, somewhat mysteriously, belief in Christian teachings did not.

Observing this rapid loss of influence, it is not surprising that the churches feel somewhat besieged. They cannot keep the society Christianised, so they have sought to maintain their own identity and to negotiate their right to exist within the new social framework. Sydney Anglicans are not unique in this. Along with other churches they have sought to maintain their right to freedom from anti-discrimination laws. The vehement opposition of church groups to the proposal for a Bill of Rights under the Rudd government (2007-09) was largely because of the fear that the Bill of Rights would represent an opportunity for secularists to place churches under the anti-discrimination laws. Instead of considering what an opportunity for good the affirmation of human rights might mean for the vulnerable, the churches bemoaned the potential loss of their own privileged separation.

But Sydney Anglicans have not been inert in those decades. Far from it: they have pursued their understanding of mission with extraordinary vigour in those times. Sydney Anglicans faced their loss of social influence in the law and in the running of people’s workaday lives by reminding each other that that this was not what the call to make disciples of all nations meant anyhow. Perhaps more quickly than other Anglicans, these evangelical Anglicans realised that they depended on a divine work for the transformation of individuals. They did not become more politicised, but less. Where other Anglicans jumped on the bandwagon of progressivist social change, Sydney Anglicans saw this as craven capitulation to the spirit of the age. They did not pursue a reactionary politics, however. They pinned their hopes on evangelism and building the church through recruiting a generation of clergy.

Billy Graham was invited back in 1968 and 1979 and his brother-in-law Leighton Ford in 198? in an effort to recapture the atmosphere of the halcyon days of ‘59. These crusades were in themselves indicators of just how much had changed in a few short years. Whereas in 1959 the organisers could bus in thousands of nominal church-goers in hats and gloves, in 1968 and 1979 this was no longer a reality. In 1959 youth groups were full of young people for whom confirmation or baptism was a rite of passage. Only the children of church-goers remained by the 1970s. The conversions of 1959 had not arrested the slide into de-christianisation. The evangelists were now coming to a society for whom church involvement was a fading memory. Baptisms, church weddings and funerals conducted by clergy would in time become exceptions rather than the habit of Sydneysiders.

Sydney Anglicans pursued another strategy with better success – university ministry. This was not new for evangelical Anglicans of course - their presence at the leading British universities through the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now the UCCF) was longstanding. The Sydney University Evangelical Union had long been the recruiting ground for Sydney Anglican leaders, lay and clerical. By the early 1970s, however, the EU had become distracted by a variety of social causes and had lost numbers. At the University of New South Wales, however, the new chaplain, Phillip Jensen, was beginning a remarkable ministry of evangelism, bible exposition and recruitment for ministry which would reach its height by the early 1990s. By the late 1980s, the Sydney University EU had likewise experienced a remarkable renovation of purpose, with evangelistic missions in 1977, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1989 and 1991 (check EU website). The national student movement, AFES, rapidly came to be dominated by graduates of the UNSW programmes. Moore College’s numbers doubled in a decade. That this occurred when churches everywhere – and especially Anglican churches elsewhere in Australia – were in rapid decline made the achievement all the more remarkable.

The fundamental principle of this new strategy was the priority of gospel work over and against ‘ordinary’ work. The key to the advancement of the gospel in the secular age was to recruit young people for full-time ministry from the university campuses. Put in nineteenth century terms, the emphasis was on clerical rather than on lay ministry. The Ministry Training Scheme (MTS) invited young university graduates to embark on a two-year ministry apprenticeship at the university prior to theological training. This trainee period would prove to be the formative experience for a generation of Anglican clergy, university workers and missionaries – diminishing the impact of Moore College somewhat in the process.

As a scheme for ensuring the evangelical character and the strength of churches and other institutions it was, and continues to be, very successful. It produced competent, energetic and well-trained clergy and church leaders with a clear sense of what to do. Other theological colleges around the country relied on handfuls of part-time students and middle-aged ordinands. Sydney’s ordinands were well under that median age and had signed up for a life time of arduous work in the Lord’s vineyards. It was a less obviously successful strategy for evangelising a nation. It produced churches that were (and are) well taught, but by making the paid minister the focus it disempowered the best evangelistic asset that the church had – the laity.
An underlying eschatology of separation was to blame. Valuing gospel over secular work was a decision for the eternal rather than the ephemeral – because ‘the time is short’ (1 Cor 7). 2 Peter 3 was a passage often invoked in this regard – explained as a description of the coming destruction of the heavens and the earth. This theology had enormous power as a critique of middle-class idolatry of careers in the hothouse environment of the university campus. However it served less well as a theology to help Christian people who actually had to work for a living. The contrast between clerical and lay vocations had not been as starkly drawn since the monastic movement in the medieval period.

Christianity in Australia has never been as politicised as it is in the USA or even in the UK. There are obvious exceptions such as Daniel Mannix (dates), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for much of the 20th century, who openly intervened in political debates amid much controversy. But he is the exception that proves the rule. The relatively quietistic approach of Sydney Anglicans then should not be seen in isolation from that broader cultural pattern. Yet it is still the case that Sydney Anglicans find a particular basis for non-intervention in their theological understanding of the world. The transformation of the community at large is a happy by-product of preaching of the gospel for which thanks and praise ought to be given to God. It is certainly a proof of the truth of the gospel that it ‘works’ as a lifestyle. But the Christian task is to preach the gospel first and foremost as a matter of eschatological urgency. Social transformation is only ever a stopgap solution. Though Sydney Anglicans were prominent in the Lausanne movement which declared in 1974 that pursuit of social justice was not incompatible with preaching the gospel, they were not enthusiastic for political and social ends. They were in fact strong critics of a kind of Christianity that denied the pressing claims of the coming end of all things and instead become a social gospel.

Australia’s political culture is robustly democratic and so a quietist stance is not in itself problematic for the most part. Other groups tend to take up the cudgels against social injustices, and there are few issues in which the lines are sharply drawn. However, the cost of this passivity can be observed in the history of the Church of England in South Africa, with whom the diocese of Sydney has had historic links. CESA was not a racist church and it has long had black and white South African bishops. It did not provide a theological justification for the apartheid policies of the South African government. However, in the aftermath of the apartheid years, Bishop Frank Retief of CESA made this submission, in 1997, to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society…We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle…Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us….The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today…It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society…

This is a courageous, impressive and moving statement from a cousin of the Sydney diocese recognising that the strategy of political withdrawal was a mistake for biblical Christians in South Africa, but recognising also that it was not the Bible itself that was to blame. Retief’s theological convictions are the same as Sydney’s, and he has often spoken in the pulpits of Sydney. What he notes here - and the message that Sydney needs - is that the theology of eschatological deferment runs the risk of becoming unable to say anything about the presence of a real evil.

A holy huddle?

To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in brutal old Sydney town has never been easy. The second chaplain to the colony, Samuel Marsden, became known as ‘the flogging parson’ because of his over-zealous administration of his weekday duties as magistrate. Despite his evident enthusiasm to preach the good news in New South Wales and also in New Zealand, he became perhaps not unreasonably diverted by the task of building and maintaining social order in a hostile and fragile environment.

His successors likewise felt the combination of inertia and hostility to the gospel wearisome. In his study of Sydney Anglicanism from 1885 to 1914, former lecturer at Moore College Bill Lawton argued that the Sydney Anglicans of that period felt under pressure from the advance of secularism. In this period, churchmen noted and bemoaned the loss of respect for Sabbath observation, the prevalence of drunkenness and threats to traditional patterns of marriage as symptomatic of the decline in the church’s influence on social order. In response to this felt crisis, Lawton argued that local Anglican leaders such as the then Principal of Moore College the Welshman Nathanael Jones came to focus their attention not on society but on the ‘little flock’ – the small gathering of believers who were waiting deliverance from the trials and tribulations of the world. They were influenced in this by the Brethrenism and revivalism characteristic of the evangelicalism of the period. As Lawton writes:

The religion of these evangelicals was essentially introspective and futurist, fearful of the social and ideological changes taking place around them. Intuitionism combined with millennialism to inhibit their developing a coherent social theory. By concentrating exclusively on ends and goals, Moore College fashioned a clergy whose sole task was to interpret the mind of God to the people of God, but who failed to interpret that mind to a secularised society.

If the choice was between accommodation and retreat, then retreat was certainly preferable.
For Lawton, the teaching about the last things – eschatology – explains the increasing defensiveness of local church pronouncements on social issues. Eschatology inevitably leads to questions about the nature of present social order and the role of the Christian church in it. Jones and others taught a form of premillennialism shaped by the thought of the well know Irish preacher John Nelson Darby (1800-82). For Darby, Scripture was an essentially prophetic book which describes humanity as being progressively dealt with by God in a series of ‘dispensations’. Each dispensation begins with a divinely appointed task that comes with a promise of blessing, and ends with an act of divine judgement. In the present dispensation, that of the church, we are to live following the judgement of God on Israel for its hardness of heart and in the light of the expectation that God will restore the kingdom to Israel. The task of the Christian evangelist is to call people out of the fallen and disgraced world and into the church – to become one of the truly converted, spiritual gathering of believers. Failing to keep society Christian by legal means or by persuasion in the press, the evangelicals prayed for the coming of revival instead.

A case study from this period was the church’s response to the Divorce Extension Bills which were proposals for liberalising the divorce laws. While in 1886 there was intense debate about the issue of divorce, but the late 1880s, the local churchmen seemed to have retreated. Society’s unwillingness to respond to the Bible’s authority on this issue seemed to take the wind out of their sails. The intervention of the clergy on this matter had not endeared them to the public:
The daily press, and particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, responded at first cautiously and deferentially but soon editorials began a hostile attack on the churchmen’s lack of compassion and their legalistic concern for semantics.

The advancing tide of secularism was met by an attempt to use the law as instrument to bring about conformity to the will of God. However when it became apparent that a gap was opening up between Christian standards and the standards of the society at large, Anglicans turned their attention back to the ‘little flock’ as a community where divine law could certainly be maintained.

Lawton the historian writes:

Sydney evangelical Anglicanism drew upon the Brethren doctrines of the church as ‘gathered community’ and Bible as a record of unfulfilled prophecy. The denomination developed a futurist eschatology in which the local ‘gathered’ community of Christians was seen as the proleptic expression of the heavenly Church.

But this is also evidence of Lawton the contemporary (1987) churchman and commentator. Throughout his book Lawton shows himself convinced that this pattern of retreat and defence against the rising tide of secularism driven by a certain eschatology and ecclesiology is characteristic of present day Sydney Anglicanism. His clear purpose is not merely antiquarian interest but critique of the present by uncovering a genealogy of theological ideas and tribal instincts. Unfortunately, he makes this case only by inference and not so much by evidence. In order to be convincing, he would have to show that even though pre-millennial theology and holiness movement piety from Sydney Anglicanism since at least the 1950s has completely faded, their impress on the Sydney Anglican mindset is still in evidence. A former longtime lecturer at Moore College, Lawton doesn’t carry out this tracing of connections explicitly – probably because of the deep personal regard he felt for Broughton Knox and others. The lines of connection between the two phases of Sydney Anglican history are not simple and are drawn here over six decades or more. Yet the relationship of eschatology to a theological understanding of the world is a connection still very much in evidence.

Nicholas Taylor on Lay Presidency

Opposition to Sydney’s proposal for lay presidency has been extremely strong from other parts of the Anglican world – even from churches who are allied with Sydney in the GAFCON movement. This proposal seems to be a step too far for many Anglicans.

An Anglican priest working in South Africa, Nicholas H. Taylor has written a substantial and sophisticated response to the proposal for lay presidency titled Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. It has to be said that the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s book rather outweigh the short polemical pieces and committee papers that have been offered by those advocating lay administration. He offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of the nature of authority in Anglicanism and on the whole gives a careful exposition of the case for lay administration before countering it with his own.

Two features of his argument mar it, however. The first is that he attempts to say what ‘Anglican’ is, but can only do so by making his own, more Catholic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper paradigmatic for all Anglican practice. The problem comes when you romanticise the Anglican compromise as a wonderful synthesis, instead of acknowledging that the ambiguity in the formularies made possible, within the same ecclesiastical structure, the presence of two mutually exclusive views of the Eucharist; and that the fragility of this compromise meant that it resolved nothing, and was always going to fall apart at some point. Taylor is unable to acknowledge the legitimate and continuous presence of the alternative reading of the sacraments in the Anglican tradition, and fails to argue against it on its own terms. What he discovers is only that the Anglican evangelical view of the sacraments is not the same as the Anglo-Catholic one. We knew this already.

Second, though Taylor is for the most part a model of scholarly dispassion, when he comes to engaging with the diocese of Sydney he is unable to contain himself and slips in to a polemic which verges on nastiness. He calls Sydney ‘an ultra-Protestant fringe of Anglicanism’ whose ‘interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer may alike be tendentious, and account of the historically somewhat liminal place this diocese has taken in the Anglican Communion, and even in the Anglican Church of Australia.’ The word ‘liminal’ – a word Taylor repeats - is the strange one here. Does he mean by it ‘barely perceptible’, or ‘a transitory state’? In any case, it is clear that Taylor wants to portray these, the most serious advocates for the position he wants to counter, as extremists and eccentrics barely worth taking seriously. He adds to this impression by pointing out to his readers the connection that Sydney Diocese has maintained over a number of decades with ‘the schismatic ecclesial group known as the Church of England in South Africa, which maintained close ties with the apartheid regime’. This is a largely irrelevant statement designed only to taint Sydney Anglicans with racism in the mind of his readers and so utterly prejudice the outcome of his discussion. The complex history of the ‘other’ Anglicans in South Africa is by no means without its regretful aspects (for which its bishop, Frank Retief, made a public declaration of apology and repentance in the 1990s); yet the phrase ‘close ties’ would be more than an exaggeration. The argument for Sydney’s ‘liminality’ means that he overlooks the long and vigorous history of evangelicals within the Church of England in almost every place that the Church of England has gone. It is a historically myopic view.

Taylor points out that while in many instances the argument for lay administration is driven by the practical problem of the lack of ordained clergy – most often in rural districts – in Sydney there is no such shortage compared to other dioceses. This observation is correct, although there are a greater number of people in congregations in Sydney Anglican churches, too. It is certainly difficult for a complete outsider to the diocese in question to offer his view on the practical needs of the ministry. He does not take into account the way in which the development of new congregations has put pressure on the current system of ordination. Nevertheless, he is correct to understand Sydney’s push for lay administration as theologically driven and not just pragmatic.

It is just that he cannot accept the theological views of Sydney as having a valid place within Anglicanism. Taylor characterises the diocese of Sydney in this way:
The agenda of the diocese of Sydney, under its current Archbishop, is to resume and bring to its completion the process of reformation disrupted by the deaths of Edward VI and Cranmer. Reform is to be continued along a theological trajectory in continuity with Cranmer.
On what evidence Taylor bases this suspicion I would like to know. He offers none. This kind of comment merely reveals the prejudice against with which his project unfortunately began. He takes Archbishop Peter Jensen to task for depending heavily on Cranmer’s views as normative for Anglicanism in his argument for lay administration. This would be to vastly overstate the claims that Jensen makes for Cranmer in his short piece on the subject. And yet, it would seem to strange to argue that, as the primary author of the Anglican formularies, Cranmer’s views are of very limited importance to the discussion. Taylor is right to point to the fact that Cranmer argues strongly for administration of the sacrament only by those duly authorised by lawful authority – but then, this is not really in dispute.

Taylor then tries to mount the perverse argument that the argument for lay presidency is actually designed to uphold hierarchical and patriarchal patterns within the diocese of Sydney:
It is not envisaged that delegation to lay people of functions such as preaching and administering holy communion in Sunday worship would involve any participation in the pastoral oversight exercised by the Archbishop and clergy of the diocese of Sydney. Power would remain vested in an exclusive male cadre, formed principally and definitively at Moore Theological College in the very particular and narrow theological tradition which Sydney represents.
The issue of lay presidency, he argues, must be linked to Sydney’s resistance to women’s ordination. If lay people – females among them – can be admitted to the business administering communion as well as communion, then what is it that not ordaining them excludes them from? Taylor deduces that it must be all about conserving the power of the clique, or the ‘cadre’, as he calls it. What ordination represents, in Taylor’s reading of the Sydney mentality, is not preaching or presiding but power. This is a kind of postmodern power-critique of the predictable kind, but it relies on speculation about the motives of others to which Taylor is certainly not privy. How is Taylor able to see what it is really about from his study on the other side of the Indian Ocean? Is he such a successful psychologist?

In fact, push for lay administration in Sydney began quite separately to and at around about the same time as the call of women’s ordination began in the wider Anglican Communion. Certainly, the proponents of lay administration have wanted to show that their understanding of ordination was not a specifically sacramental one, and that their objection to women’s ordination was not on the basis of the Anglo-Catholic reasoning about sacerdotal ministry. If anything, however, lay administration would open up leadership opportunities for lay men and women and for female deacons in Sydney, which is a diocese with a long history of active lay leadership by both genders and which employs more women in ministry than any other. Taylor’s comments about the ‘particular and narrow theological tradition’ represented by Sydney reveal only his (deliberate?) ignorance of the ongoing presence of evangelicals within Anglicanism around the globe. If it is only in Sydney that they have been able to influence an entire diocese in the way they have, it is because of the political hegemony of the liberal catholic party elsewhere. Most dioceses in the world would represent a ‘very particular and narrow theological tradition’ – namely, the liberal catholic one – under whose powerful rule it is oftentimes very difficult for evangelicals to live. It is a bit rich, quite frankly, to be lectured on power politics from the point of view of the most successful political grouping in the Anglican Communion.

Taylor makes a great deal of an almost throw away comment by Archbishop Peter Jensen. In advocating for liturgical change, Jensen described the current forms of liturgy as ‘almost irrelevant’ in the context of contemporary mission. By this he did not mean, as Taylor takes him to mean, that the gathering together of the people of God around the word and sacrament was irrelevant – only that the forms in which we have continued to practice our meeting have become inaccessible and impenetrable to the secularised world. Yet Taylor riffs on this phrase, claiming that

As a theology of the laity, it denigrates the people of God to whom the ‘almost irrelevant’ ministry of word and sacrament is entrusted, while clergy are engaged in the ministry which really matters.

This is just plain misreading – and it is certainly not the intention of those who argue for lay administration. What Taylor completely ignores is the vigorous support for lay administration from lay people themselves within the diocese of Sydney. Far from being a plot by the men at head office to shore up their own power, the envisaged change is meant to complete the ‘lay revolution’ begun in the late 1960s by admitting lay people to the ministry of the table as well as the ministry of the pulpit.

The pity is that Taylor’s book is an otherwise very accomplished and judicious work carried out with appropriate scholarly dispassion. At the end of his extended review of the subject, he argues that the issue of who presides at the Lord’s Supper is a second order issue, and that it is permissible in certain emergency situations. From Taylor’s point of view, the most suitable solution to the shortage of clergy is the ordination of local Christian leadership as ‘the most satisfactory alternative to authorized lay presidency at the eucharist’. I fail to see what the difference between lay administration and local ordination is, especially if you do not share a more catholic view of ordination. It is nowhere envisaged that lay administration would mean unauthorised administration – there would have to be a system of due authorisation of lay ministers, just as there is for lay preachers. And the authorisation would hold for the services in the local parish and not elsewhere. Is the difference between lay administration and local ordination only then a matter of what you call it? It would seem so – unless you have a quasi-mystical view of the effects of ordination. Local ordination is no less a novelty than lay administration. So why is this alternative preferable and the Sydney suggestion anathema?

Losing the Plot? Psalm 17 and November 5th (a sermon)

On this day, November 5th, in 1605 a search of the dank undercroft of the House of Lords carried out in response to an anonymous tip-off discovered a cache of thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

Guarding the horde was a thirty-five year old former soldier named Guy Fawkes. As a recent documentary presented by Top Gear’s Richard Hammond has amply and rather spectacularly demonstrated, this was more than enough gunpowder for its intended purpose: to ensure the utter destruction to rubble of the building and the death of anyone unlucky enough to be in it at the time. The planned time, the day of November 5th, was scheduled for the opening of parliament. The hope of the conspirators was of course that the Protestant King, James 1, would be among those destroyed in the blast and that they would thereafter by able to install his daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic queen. Instead of becoming a date of sombre remembrance, as September 11 has surely become in our time, Nov 5th became for the English nation a day of joyous celebration, with effigies of the hapless Fawkes placed atop large bonfires and fireworks exploding. And of course it was not merely held to be a national deliverance; it was a religiously significance moment. For years, the church bells would ring and special prayers and sermons would be offered on the day as a thanksgiving to God for his rescue of the English nation and its people.

The custom seems quaint to us today in this far off time and place. Yet there remains for us in our world a fine line between terror and triumph, between paranoia and providentialism, between fear and festival; and we ought to recognise that we sit at times on either side of that line. As in the past, we have a sense of the genuine fragility of our way of life and our deep dread of it all being swept away, not merely by some natural disaster, but by the hands of our enemies; and our feeling that if we survive it is because of, or evidence of, some divine vindication of our way of life. It is the theology of the golfer who thanks God for his victories, or of the movie star who clutches her Golden Globe in one hand and a claim of divine favour in the other. Like most bad theology it gains its power from being half-true.

Today’s Psalm seems to plunge us into that perspective, but very much on the side of fear. The Psalmist is, he feels, surrounded by his enemies (vs 9), pursued by them remorselessly (vs 10-11), the subject of what could be described as a vendetta (vs 11):

11 They lie waiting in our way on every side,
watching to cast us down to the ground;
12 Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey,
and as it were a lion’s whelp lurking in secret places.

He has, it seems, a good basis for his fear. His life is exposed to the wickedness of others. We shouldn’t imagine these fears to be baseless – even if we have not had the feeling of complete isolation and despair in the face of determined opponents who wish our destruction, we know of enough instances of this experience to understand it as a reality that some do experience. The canon of Scripture of course links this Psalm to the narrative of David’s life and his experience of Saul’s determined and murderous pursuit.

And so his appeal to Yhwh is desperate, made on the basis of his real experience of fear. He wants God to ‘Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the ungodly, that trouble me;’h - in other words, to secure him when all seems insecure. But more than this: he wants Yhwh to vindicate him by overthrowing his enemies (vs 13) –

13 Up, LORD, disappoint him, and cast him down;
deliver my soul from the ungodly, by thine own sword.

He appeals for a violent and decisive end to this persecution. And the appeal emerges from two convictions:

One is the conviction that his cause is just, and that he has himself not been dishonest in his appeal. We see this in vs 1-5. He is convinced of the rightness of his cause, and that if his heart is exposed to the judgement of God he will be found innocent. Likewise: his feet, he claims, have not slipped from the divine path – he has been a committed follower of God. He’s a victim, and he can see no way in which he is complicit in the crime.

We ought to note that there is no embarrassment about naming oppression and injustice, no sense in which he is a self-blaming victim. Though we should be aware enough of the capacity of human beings to self-justify and to overlook our own involvement in evildoing, we should not let ourselves become deaf to the cries of real victims.

Still, there is an awkwardness of the demand for divine vindication – since even if I am guiltless here, in this matter, I am certainly not, there, in that matter. Surely if nothing else a Christian frame of mind tells us to be wary here of catching specks while missing logs.

The second basis for his appeal is to the character of the Lord – he is the God of hesed, of steadfast love. The Lord is a saviour of those who seek refuge – the one whose renown down the ages has been for his rescue of the slaves from Egypt.

But both of these bases for his appeal require us as Christian readers to say more, given our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.

The character of God the Psalmist knew from the Exodus and from his covenant with national Israel. The way in which we understand the salvation and the refuge of God and the steadfast love of the divine being is in the cross of Jesus Christ. We see there God’s commitment to his world not only as a victory, but as a victory won through the channel of defeat. We see there not only the divine conquest, but that the divine conquest comes in the midst of submission to the wickedness of humanity, absorbing the worst of its blows. The divine response to this human complaint is to make these words divine words – Jesus knew the fear, pain and isolation in the fragility of life surrounded by, taunted by and tortured by his enemies.

Already we can see how the second basis for the Psalmist’s appeal is open to a Christian understanding – the innocence of the Psalmist is the innocence of the Son, of Jesus himself, who was innocent of all deceit and wickedness, whose feet did not transgress, - and who was vindicated by God when he was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place. It was he who ‘beheld God’s face in righteousness’; who met the conditions of the just judgement of God against the outrages of human behaviour and in whom we can know justification and righteousness, vindication, hope and security. It is Christ who makes this prayer our prayer – he makes it a prayer we can pray without self-justification, or self-righteousness, or triumphalism. He makes it possible for us to hope in the teeth of our terrible crisis. It makes it possible for us to receive God’s blessings without understanding this as something belongs to us by right, or as a sign of our own inherent superiority. It is a grace that teaches us gratitude. He makes it possible for us to name injustice and condemn it without hypocrisy. He enables us to be the ones that overcome.

Psalm 17, we discover, is a prayer a Christian martyr could pray – in hope that their cause is just and that God is a present help in trouble.

Still Anglican

While the puritan and evangelical heritage of Sydney Anglicans gives them ample grounds to stake out within the Anglican tradition and to resist being marginalised, the reality to be admitted is that both of these groups have had at times testy relationships with the structural and institutional side of Anglicanism. Puritans were frustrated with the lack of further progress in doctrinal and liturgical reform and so many of them left the Church of England or were forced out. Evangelical Anglicans have always freely co-operated with evangelicals in other denominations, and have prioritised gospel work at the expense of institutional conformity. As Turnbull writes, ‘[H]istorically, Anglican Evangelicals have proved flexible over church order in the interests of the gospel’. But if Anglicanism has been flexible enough to accommodate evangelicals, it has also been flexible with progressive liberalism. Evangelicals have felt stymied in their mission by an institution which in turn seems only too ready to endorse the liberal agenda in faith and conduct. For evangelical Anglicans in every generation the question arises ‘what is the tipping point as far as remaining an Anglican goes?

It was certainly an issue for evangelicals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Could they continue to preach the gospel unhindered in the Church of England when all about ritualism and liberalism were advancing? At a gathering of evangelical clergy from the Eastern Counties on the 11th June 1879, Bishop J.C. Ryle of Liverpool delivered this stirring call to remain:

No doubt you live in days when our time-honoured church is in very perilous, distressing and critical position. Her rowers have brought her into troubled water. Her very existence is endangered by papists, infidels, and liberationists without. Her life-blood is drained away by the behaviour of traitors, false friends and timid officers within. Nevertheless, so long as the Church of England sticks firmly to the Bible, the Articles, and the principles of the Protestant Reformation, so long I advise you strongly to stick to the church. When the Articles are thrown overboard, and the old flag is hauled down, then, and not till then, it will be time for you and me to launch the boats and quit the wreck. At present, let us stick to the old ship….Why should we leave her now, like cowards, because she is in difficulties, and the truth cannot be maintained within her pale without trouble? To whom can we go? Where shall we find better prayers? In what communion shall we find so much good being done, in spite of the existence of much evil? No doubt there is much to sadden us; but there is not a single visible church on earth at this day doing better. There is not a single communion where there are no clouds, and all is serene.


The Evangelical Anglican concedes that he or she is not a member of a pure church, or a purely reformed church. But it is, as Ryle says, a theological mistake to expect purity and unity in any visible church.

A similar crisis point came in October 1966 when the free church preacher Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), speaking at the National Assembly of Evangelicals, called upon evangelical clergy in denominations that were not exclusively evangelical to leave and to join with him in forming an evangelical denomination in which doctrinal purity could be assured. It seemed at the time like a reasonable appeal to evangelicals in the Church of England, who were increasingly marginalised and on the defensive, and who had watched openly radical scholars such as J.A.T. Robinson (1919 – 1983) rewarded for their unorthodoxy by elevation to the episcopate. At this point the acknowledged leader of the Anglican evangelicals, John Stott, intervened. This lead to the wholesale recommitment of evangelicals to working within the Church of England in 1967 at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele. A similar conference was held in Australia, but with no lasting impact.

Encouraged by the lead of John Stott, evangelicals in the Anglican Communion have largely held their ground. In the last forty years, the Anglican denominational structures have been in many cases quite congenial to the missional aspirations of evangelicals. Where other types of Anglican churches have waned, evangelical churches have certainly not. In that time the increase of evangelical numbers in the churches of the west has opened up new divisions, it must be granted. Tensions over the emphasis on charismatic gifts and the ministry of women continue to simmer. The consecration of woman as bishops may prove to be a step too far for some evangelicals in the Church of England.

For Sydney Anglican evangelicals then there is every good reason to remain committed to the Anglican church. Sydney Anglicans have felt concern at developments in the national and global Anglican Communion and have frequently wondered aloud whether they could continue in fellowship with these bodies – or what form that fellowship might take. They ought to remember that, as well as being an age of terrible division and confusion, the last forty years have been an era of remarkable innovation and experimentation in the name of mission and there is much to give thanks about.

Yet if Sydney Anglicans want to stay within the fellowship of Anglican churches they need to do so in good faith. They cannot point the finger at those who transgress in the areas of faith and conduct if they themselves are in the process of eroding the Anglican edifice. For example, the supreme authority of Scripture in Anglicanism is given a particular mode of reception – by dint of the two great creeds, the sacraments and the role of the episcopate. Anglicanism is not a tradition in which every interpretation of Scripture is held to be equally valid – even if there is considerable room for disagreement. This is in contrast to churches that subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, which is far more detailed. It may be that, in all good conscience, some evangelical Christians need to admit that the Anglican expression of Christianity is not for them. They would not be the first.

Anglicanism doesn’t require much, but it does require some things. Just as I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican and to deny the resurrection or the Trinity, I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican with any authenticity and honesty and to have a greatly reduced role for the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. These examples are not equally serious, of course. However, a church which substituted the practice of the Lord’s Supper for a fellowship tea would not be an Anglican church and should have the honesty to say so. It may still be a Christian church – but it could not continue as an Anglican church.

Evangelical and Anglican?

If Sydney Anglicans identify somewhat with the Puritans, especially of the Elizabethan era, it is also the case that they identify very strongly with the ‘Evangelical’ movement of the eighteenth century. The first chaplains of the colony were evangelicals and sponsored by the circle of Charles Simeon, one of the leading evangelicals of the Church of England. Like the Puritan movement, this was a movement that began within but subsequently exceeded the bounds of the Church of England. The established church proved too limiting for many and also sought to persecute and expel the proponents of evangelicalism. And yet, there is no doubt that evangelicalism has played and continues to play a major part in the history and ethos of Anglicanism. As Turnbull says, ‘…Anglican Evangelicalism is a manifestation of the Christian faith which gives fullness of expression to the core foundational beliefs of both Anglican and Evangelical Christian traditions’.

Most commonly, the Evangelical movement is thought to have begun in the eighteenth century with the conversion of John Wesley (1703-1791) in 1738. Labelled ‘enthusiasts’ by their opponents in the Church of England, the evangelicals were treated with a great deal of hostility and found difficulty in obtaining livings. This ‘enthusiasm’, though it seemed crass to some of their co-religionists, was representative of an extraordinary reawakening of ardent faith. It was also a judgement that the assumption that mere membership in the Church of England was sufficient for Christian identity was deeply flawed. It was after all a direct reaction against the dryness, formalism and rationalism that characterised much of early eighteenth century established Christianity. A Christianity without a heart for God was clearly deficient. The evangelical movement lead to missionary zeal and social reform on a grand scale; evangelicals formed societies and co-operated trans-denominationally. They wrote hymns that are still sung today. John Wesley and George Whitfield (1714-1770) become famous as open-air preachers. Like the Puritans, it is has to be said that the evangelicals oftentimes inhabited the fringes of the institutional church. They seemed less interested in ecclesiastical preferment and more concerned with missionary work. They were often directly persecuted by the authorities.
The term ‘evangelical’ itself is contested territory, both as a historical description and as a identifier for contemporary Christians. My purpose here is not to become entangled in this debate, but simply to show with broad brush strokes that evangelicalism and Anglicanism overlap considerably. Anglicanism is a great denominational home for evangelicalism, but it is not the only one. Likewise, evangelicalism has made and continues to make a considerable contribution to Anglicanism. The British historian David Bebbington’s description of evangelicalism is the best known and most widely used and will be sufficient to frame our discussion here. Bebbington speaks of ‘a quadrilateral of priorities’ – namely, conversionism, activism, Biblicism and crucicentricism.

Evangelicals are conversionist in that they proclaim the necessity of personal transformation in response to the gospel of grace. They preach to the heart, appealing for repentance of sin and turning to God in dependence. Their gospel is highly individualist in this sense – it is not sufficient for true Christian faith merely to be in possession of membership in a church grouping. Evangelicals are also, as Bebbington speaks of them, activist. They expected the evangelical conversion to result in a transformation of life. This meant that the believer was expected to be busy in the process of moral renewal and in seeking the conversion and moral renewal of others. The activism characteristic of evangelicals resulted in evangelistic mission but also in programmes for social welfare on a large scale. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury become bywords for the activist streak within evangelicalism.
Evangelicals have always been people of the Bible. Like their Reformation forebears, they have taken Scripture as the supreme authority for Christian life and for doctrine. The centrality of preaching for evangelicals is evidence of what this means in practice. As well as being Biblicist, the evangelical is also crucicentric – which means that central place is given to the atoning work of Christ on the cross. Christ is an exemplary figure and a moral teacher, but he is first and foremost the saviour who died for sin.

In bringing Anglicanism and evangelicalism together, Anglican Evangelicals have mostly but not exclusively subscribed to a form of moderate Calvinism. This description would apply to the faith of two of the greatest of evangelical Anglicans, Charles Simeon (1759-1836) and Bishop J.C. Ryle (1816-1900). They appealed for their identity within Anglicanism to the Protestant and Reformed nature of the Anglican settlements of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. However, they did not insist on the rigorous application of Reformed doctrine, especially over the extent of the atonement. Just as Article 17 is quite a restrained account of predestination, so Anglican Evangelicals have certainly asserted but not overemphasised this teaching. Most often co-operation in evangelism and fellowship with non-Calvinist evangelicals overrode concerns about absolute purity of doctrine. Even if the effects of the atonement were to be applied only to the elect, the preaching of the gospel was to be to all.

This ethos is perhaps where tension with the institutional framework of Anglicanism most often surfaces. More often than not, evangelicals have felt themselves excluded from the positions of power within the Anglican churches of the West. Their priority has always been the preaching of the gospel and not the maintenance of the institutional church. Their ecclesiology – and they most certainly do have an ecclesiology – does not tend to recognise the bureaucratic side of the denomination as ‘church’. If the institution inhibits the preaching of the gospel, then there is no question where compromise has to be made. For other Anglicans with a more hierarchical view this seems like schismatic behaviour.

As the Oxford movement grew in influence in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the evangelicals insisted on the Protestantism of the Church of England, often to the point of legal controversy. The most celebrated – or notorious, depending on your point of view - of these incidents was the ‘Gorham case’ of 1846-7. Evangelical clergyman Charles Gorham clashed with his Tractarian bishop Henry Phillpotts over the critical issue of infant baptism. Gorham, taking the evangelical position, asserted that baptism did not necessarily effect regeneration. After all, evangelicals believed in repentance and conversion. Phillpotts pointed to the wording of the Book of Common Prayer which seems to refer to the child as regenerate; and wanted to refuse him a post in his diocese as a man of unsound doctrine. The precedent set by the case could have made the position of every evangelical clergyman in England uncertain to say the least. The case made its way as far as the non-ecclesiastical Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which finally found for Gorham. What this meant was that the place of evangelicals within the Church of England was secured. Their interpretation of the formularies was certainly permitted, if not entirely endorsed.

In Sydney there is an entire diocese in a major city which is run by evangelicals. This breaks with the usual experience of evangelicals as having almost no institutional leverage and in having to live within diocesan structures which are liberal-Catholic in flavour. The evangelical behaviours which have irritated non-evangelical Anglicans historically are magnified in the case of Sydney. The unusual dominance of evangelicals in the diocesan structure of Sydney diocese means that Sydney does look strange to Anglicans who are accustomed to liberal-Catholic hegemony – and ecclesiology - elsewhere. Liberal-Catholics expect to be in charge of things. But they would be mistaken in calling evangelicalism ‘unAnglican’, for the moderate Calvinist evangelical outlook of Sydney with its missionary activism and its Biblicism and with its emphasis on the atoning blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sins is utterly consistent with the evangelical Anglican tradition that has had an unbroken presence in the Church of England for nearly three centuries. The English evangelical Anglican Alister McGrath has written:

My concern is simply to insist that evangelicalism is, historically and theologically, a legitimate and respectable option within Anglicanism. At no point is evangelicalism inconsistent with any of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the only document apart from Scripture, the creeds and the Prayer Book, regarded as authoritative for Anglicans.

It has not only been my intention to show here that Sydney’s evangelical Anglicans have a legitimate place within Anglicanism. History shows that the evangelicalism held so dear by Sydney’s Anglicans arose from and was to a great extent nurtured by Anglicanism. The Anglican operating system was not always strictly compatible with the evangelical software, but at many points it actually helped -and helps - it to run better.

Puritan and Anglican?

Sydney Anglicans more often than not trace their heritage to the great Church of England figures of the sixteenth century – to Cranmer, to Latimer and Ridley and to the others who were leaders under Edward VI and martyred under his sister Mary. Marcus Loane (1911-2009), Archbishop of Sydney from 1966-81 and formerly Principal of Moore College, authored a number of popular histories of this period after the manner of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. The defiant stance of these figures on the basis of the Protestant and Reformed character of the Church of England was an marker of identity in 1950s and 60s Australia – a period in which sectarianism was much more prominent as a social issue and a period in which the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Anglican Church of Australia was making a great deal of headway. As the national church came together, would Sydney Anglicans remain true to the faith for which the great Marian martyrs died? Certainly they would.

The somewhat romantic appeal to the martyrdoms of the Marian reign is a hint that a particular reading of the course of the English Reformation is in place: that the short reign of Edward VI was a Protestant high water-mark for the Church of England, but that the programme begun in that brief period (1547-53) had remained unfinished. On this reading of the English Reformation, there is some sympathy for those who later chafed at the slow rate of change under Elizabeth’s rule and who became known as ‘the Puritans’. It is one of those words – like ‘fundamentalist’- that has become (indeed always was) a religious term of abuse, with its image of humourless and stern moral nitpickers. This label has been frequently applied to Sydney Anglicans by their detractors not only to indicate their determination to further reform Anglicanism along Protestant lines but also to their alleged moral seriousness.

Historically speaking, the label ‘Puritan’ is a broad brush. There were Puritans over the long period of their prominence (from 1560s through to 1680s) who strongly disagreed with each other over what needed to change in the church and which doctrines to emphasise. Ultimately it was the Puritans of Parliament who rose up against the forces of Charles I and had him executed in 1649, inaugurating the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-58). Puritans were at various times persecuted and even expelled by the church authorities. Yet at the same time, the presence within the Church of England of those who might identify with the Puritan disposition has been ongoing. As Richard Turnbull has written ‘[T]hroughout the history of the Church of England there has also been a persecution of Puritan divines and yet also a continuing presence within the Church of those of Puritan disposition.’ This was so even after the ‘Great Ejection’, when nearly 2,000 Puritan clergy chose to leave their livings in protest against the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Interestingly, it was the issue of the royal supremacy which was most controversial. The restoration of the Book of Common Prayer, somewhat modified in line with Puritan sensibilities, was not nearly as problematic.

To identify with the Puritans, then, is not to repudiate Anglicanism. It is certainly to insist on the importance of right doctrine and on the propriety of ongoing reform of church practices in line with Scripture – and this is not to the taste of some other Anglicans. Some streams of Puritanism certainly found themselves outside the Church of England. Those Puritans who would advocate Presbyterianism, for example, found themselves outside of the bounds of the Church of England following the Restoration. It would be hard to make the case for a non-episcopal version of Anglicanism today. On matters of church governance, discipline and order, the normative rather than the regulative principle holds sway with Anglicanism. However, it was frequently matters to do with Church-State relations that led to the rebellion and then departure of Puritan clergy from the established church. It is fascinating to note that this was the very goad against which the Oxford movement kicked. John Keble’s famous 1833 sermon ‘National Apostasy’ was an attack on the collaboration of the Church of England with its government. For Anglicans not now living in England under royal supremacy, this issue is entirely irrelevant.

What this means is that Puritans have had a long-standing place within the Church of England and within Anglicanism, and that one of the major issues on which they took their stand they were not the only ones to do so and there is now in any case no longer any controversy. If Sydney Anglicans are Puritans, it does not follow that they are not also Anglicans.

Anglicanism as 'unabashed Protestantism'?

What is an ‘Anglican’? In one sense the term itself is anachronistic. The Church of England is primarily an institution, the national church of a particular country. It was only with the growth of the British Empire that the question of ‘Anglicanism’ arose – especially when there was now a political separation between England and the US. The Episcopal Church was not governed by the King of England from 1776 – so in what sense could it, and other former Church of England churches, understand their continuity with the church that had given them birth? It was an identity question that was felt with a particular pressure in the nineteenth century and which has decisive significance for the way we consider the question of ‘Anglicanism’ today.

Those of more Catholic disposition have emphasised the continuity of the English church today with the church of the pre-Reformation period. Even when it was in communion with the Church of Rome, the English church (the ecclesia Anglicana) had its own remarkable and somewhat independent identity. The tension between the papacy and the English monarchy – which came to a head in the Reformation – had many precedents, including the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in 1170 by King Henry II’s henchmen. However, any assertion of a continuity of heritage between the pre-Reformation Church and what came later has to reckon with the complexity and diversity of that history. For example, in the seventh century AD both Celtic and Roman styles of Christianity competed for supremacy in the English Church. Which is to be held as more authentically ‘Anglican’? Or is it a synthesis between them? Where in the story does the radicalism of the Oxford scholar John Wyclif (1330-78) and the movement of his followers, the Lollards, fit in? That is to say: describing a continuous line from the pre-Reformation period to the present has more challenges than the standard Anglo-Catholic description allows. The demand for reform and the appeal to the authority of Scripture is part of the picture that ought not to be obscured.

Since the 1980s, revisionist historians such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have tried to describe the English Reformation as a top-down and chiefly political movement which had little traction amongst the English people themselves. There is no doubt that the English Reformation was achieved through the workings of statecraft as much as through the conversion of souls. Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’ - the problem of his barren marriage to Catherine of Aragon – was the catalyst not only for an institutional break with the Church of Rome and with the papacy, but for a change in the theological outlook of the English church. While Haigh and Duffy try to paint this as entirely engineered by a coterie of theologians like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, there is no question but that the faith of Reformation Europe had made some inroads among the English people, however clandestine.

Thomas Cranmer is not a figure for Anglicans equivalent to the way Martin Luther is for Lutherans. Nonetheless, Cranmer’s Reformation bequeathed to the English Church as particular theological outlook which cannot be eclipsed in any description of Anglican identity. Though some have tried, Richard Turnbull notes ‘[I]t is difficult to deny the formative role of the Reformation on the polity, theology and ministry of the Church of England.’

Cranmer set down three large foundation stones upon which henceforth the English church was subsequently built: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. These have not come down to us unaltered from his pen. They were subject to a degree of refinement and alteration. Even so, the attempt to minimise the importance of these formularies in some parts of the Anglican church in recent years only reveals an embarrassment with the unabashed Protestantism of these documents. While it would be historically naïve to think of the career of Cranmer as the reset point for Anglican identity – as if nothing has happened since then, or as if he is an Anglican Muhammad – it is certainly the case that no description of Anglican identity can bypass or minimise his contribution to the theological distinctiveness of Anglicanism.

‘Unabashed Protestantism’ – is that an overstatement? That the liturgy was now to be in the vernacular was in itself a recognition of a different – Protestant (or better, ‘evangelical’) - understanding of the very nature of Christian faith itself. The words of the Prayer Book were not meant to be experienced by the people as a mystery evading their understanding. The service of Holy Communion was, in successive editions of the Prayer Book, moving in a more Protestant direction. Recent work by renowned Oxford historian Dairmaid MacCulloch shows that Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology was becoming even less like Luther’s understanding of the ‘real presence’ and shifting towards a Reformed understanding. The document that became The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion is unmistakeably Reformed in character. It is true that the articles do allow for a deal of flexibility, and do not pronounce on some controversial matters. Yet that should not be mistaken for some policy of reticence or the endorsement of infinite variety. The embarrassment of liberal and Catholic Anglicans at the Articles is a fairly strong indication that the plain reading of them sees them as an expression of a Reformed theological outlook.
The Articles assert the primacy of the authority of Scripture for Anglican faith and practice. That is not to say that Scripture is the only authority, but it is held to be the supreme authority, even over the great creeds of the church (Article VIII). Article VI reads: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’. According to the articles, Scripture is to act as the measure of what Anglicans believe.

For two great Elizabethan Anglicans, Scripture was likewise of paramount importance. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is often held up as the doyen of Anglican divines – ‘judicious’, rational, careful and moderate in tone. He was an opponent of the Puritan extremists in the Church of England who were moving against the episcopate and against all customs not explicitly sanctioned in Scripture. For a long time it was thought that he had endorsed ‘the three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as equal, mutually-informing authorities in Anglican thinking. Careful reading of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity tells another story. He writes:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).

Scripture, reason and tradition do not have equal weight for Hooker. Quite clearly, Scripture has precedence, then reason and third, church tradition. Though the Puritans were mistaken when they opposed tradition where Scripture was silent, they were correct in placing Scripture ahead of all other authorities. Hooker can be described as endorsing the ‘normative’ view of Scripture with regard to church order and ceremonies, as opposed to the ‘regulative’ view championed by his Puritan opponents such as William Perkins and Thomas Cartwright. He conceded that the threefold order of ministry – bishop, priest and deacon – cannot be directly established from Scripture, but that the historic episcopate is nevertheless a good way to frame the polity of the English church.

In his 1562 work Apology of the Church in England, Bishop John Jewel (1522-71) of Salisbury made an ardent defence of the Reformation settlement in England, setting it over against the abuses of the Church of Rome. He depicted the Church of England as episcopal, but thoroughly Reformed in doctrine. The Church of England in its stance against Rome needed to be convincingly apostolic. It could do so by appeal to Scripture; but also by appeal to the Church Fathers and to the Councils. This was not to invest them with an authority independent of Scripture, but to show that, even on their preferred ground, the Roman Church was not the true heir of the apostolic teaching.

To the work of these two Elizabethan divines we might well add the declaration of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in 1888 as an instance in Anglican history when the primacy of Scripture was clearly asserted. The 1888 Lambeth conference of bishops received in slightly amended form a document which had been passed by the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1886. The four points of the quadrilateral are, in order: Holy Scripture as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’; the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed; the two sacraments; and the historic episcopate. The basis of the unity of the Anglican Communion is thus a common confession of faith derived from Scripture.

What these examples prove is quite modest, but it is sufficient. They demonstrate that those who hold that it is thoroughly and authentically Anglican to view Scripture as the supreme authority have a more than reasonable case grounded in the major documents of Anglican history and in the thought of its major theologians. Furthermore, on soteriology and the sacraments it is quite clearly possible to discern a succession of authoritative figures and documents that assert the Reformed view, however distasteful this might be to some contemporary Anglicans. There are other readings of Anglican history – most notably the reading perpetuated by the Oxford movement in the 19th century, which emphasised the Caroline divines and their appeal to the Church Fathers. Yet even this sketch of Anglicanism shows that this reading of Anglican history could only ever be a selective and polemical one. A Christian faith which places it emphasis on the supreme authority of Scripture for doctrine and practice and which upholds the Reformed view or salvation and the sacraments can with confidence assert its continuous place within the Anglican story. A view of Anglicanism which places Scripture as supreme authority and which has a Reformed soteriology and which has a flexible attitude to liturgical practice certainly has a good case to be considered as authentically Anglican. However, this plurality and flexibility is not infinite.

An Emerging Church Bibliography

...for an MA Course I am teaching with Archie Poulos next year.


Burke, Spencer. Out of the Ooze : Unlikely Love Letters to the Church from Beyond the Pew. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2007.

Burke, Spencer, and Colleen Pepper. Making Sense of Church : Eavesdropping on Emerging Conversations About God, Community, and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003.

Burke, Spencer, and Barry Taylor. A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.

Carson, D. A. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church : Understanding a Movement and Its Implications. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2005.

DeYoung, Kevin, and Ted Kluck. Why We're Not Emergent : By Two Guys Who Should Be. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008.

Frost, Michael, and Alan Hirsch. Rejesus : A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church. Peabody, Mass. Sydney: Hendrickson Publishers ; Strand Publishing, 2009.

Gibbs, Eddie, and Ryan K. Bolger. Emerging Churches : Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005.

Grenz, Stanley J. Renewing the Center : Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2000.

Grenz, Stanley J., and John R. Franke. Beyond Foundationalism : Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context. 1st ed. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Jones, Tony. The New Christians : Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. 1st ed, A Living Way. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Kimball, Dan. The Emerging Church : Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003.

Kirkpatrick, Cathy, Mark Pierson, and Michael Riddell. The Prodigal Project : Journey into the Emerging Church. London: SPCK, 2000.

McKnight, Scot. The Blue Parakeet : Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008.

McKnight, Scot. Embracing Grace : A Gospel for All of Us. Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2005.

McKnight, Scot. The Jesus Creed : Loving God, Loving Others. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2004.

McLaren, Brian D. A Generous Orthodoxy : Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian. El Cajon, CA: Youth Specialties, 2006.

McLaren, Brian D. A New Kind of Christianity : Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith. 1st ed. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

Murray, Stuart. Church after Christendom, After Christendom. Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004.

Smith, James K. A. Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? : Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006.

Sweet, Leonard I., and Frank Viola. Jesus Manifesto : Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2010.

Tomlinson, Dave. The Post Evangelical. Rev. North American ed. El Cajon, CA: Emergent YS/Zondervan, 2003.

Webber, Robert. Ancient-Future Faith : Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999.

Webber, Robert. Ancient-Future Worship : Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative, Ancient-Future Series. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2008.

Webber, Robert, John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, Karen M. Ward, and Mark Driscoll. Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches : Five Perspectives. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2007.

Preaching and the confusion of terms

The notion of preaching as it has come to be understood and practiced in evangelical pulpits is beset by terminological and theological confusions. Peter Adam defines preaching as ‘the explanation and application of the Word in the assemble congregation of Christ’. That definition certainly reflects current practice. Yet it is hard to find a direct comparison between what we can see practised in the New Testament - and the terminology that was used to describe it – and what we know as ‘preaching’ in the churches of the Sydney diocese and elsewhere. There is certainly a well-established tradition of preaching as a sustained monologue from a trained pastor in the setting of a church service. This tradition may be a proper development from the New Testament experience, but it is hard to see how it directly compares to what happened in the early churches.

Characteristically, Donald Robinson worked on the words. In an unpublished paper read at the Autumn School of Theology held at Moore College in 1966, Robinson pointed out that there finds three fairly clearly distinct activities by which the Word of God is conveyed in the New Testament. There is the handing on, or teaching, of the paradosis or tradition. There was the activity of prophecy, a highly valued gift in which exhortations and encouragements were delivered. And then there was the preaching of the gospel to those outside the church: ‘the very spearhead of God’s overture to lost mankind’.

The conventional ‘sermon’ (literally ‘a word’) is usually a mixture of all three of these things in various proportions. A preacher characteristically preaches the gospel, passes on the faith ‘once delivered to all the saints’, and prophesies (in the sense that Donald Robinson means it here). Yet it would also be the case that these activities are not restricted to formal occasions. The ministry of the Word, Sydney Anglicans would want to emphasise, can take place mutually and informally among Christians. Those without office in the church are invited to join in this mutual Word ministry. Romans 15:14 calls on Christians to ‘instruct one another’, and is confident of the capability of any Christian in the Spirit to perform this role. The day of Pentecost, after all, was declared by Peter to by the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel that the Spirit would be poured out on young men and women such that prophecy would no longer be a gift restricted to a few carefully designated individuals.

While there is a kind of democratisation of this ministry of the word, there is also in practice the sense in which ‘preaching’ is connected to a particular ‘office’ and is the work of a particular designated individual, the preacher. The sermon that is preached by this person is usually given the bulk of the time in a church service. It is somewhat confusing to use ‘preaching’ language to describe the informal encouragements and exhortations that occur between Christians. Furthermore, there is no need for a sense of embarrassment that giving this particular person’s Word ministry pride of place contradicts the Reformation notion of ‘priesthood of all believers’. Far better to use the label ‘ministry of the word’ to describe that general activity and to reserve ‘preaching’ for the specific, formal monologue in the church meeting.

It is extremely useful to have the terminology of the New Testament clarified and shown that it doesn’t quite fit with today’s practice of preaching. This helps us to be appropriately flexible about our customs. But it is entirely appropriate that this traditional practice has developed as a way of receiving the New Testament material rather than as a way of expressing it exactly. Returning to the primitive terminology in order to clear away the accretions of traditional practice, as if in that terminology was indicator of normativity to be found, is a dubious process. It is doubtful whether a coherent or consistent answer could be found. The New Testament terminology is somewhat loose and overlapping. The data is too sketchy. Enormous effort has been put into trying to define what ‘prophecy’ and ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching’ actually mean, on the assumption that the usage of these terms by the New Testament church reflects a normative practice. I not at all convinced that this is a productive line of inquiry. ‘Preaching’ as we know it now is an activity of the church which is entirely in keeping with the kind of church it has learnt to be from reading the New Testament – even if it is not exactly what the churches of the New Testament were doing when they met.

The dramatic persona of the preacher

Preaching is carried out by preachers. Although as Protestants, Sydney Anglican evangelicals do not have a priestly view of the ministry, the preacher is certainly a designated, called and highly trained for his role. For all the talk about every-member ministry, it is preaching that is the chief ministry in the congregation and the most special calling. The figure of the preacher assumes an almost heroic status. Ideally, the preacher embodies Christ himself – and like one of the great martyrs of the church is ready to suffer for the truth if necessary. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the preacher imitates the apostle Paul as he in turn speaks of his own imitation of Christ in his ministry in 1 and 2 Corinthians. The onerous duty of the preacher is that he is called upon to say hard as well as gentle things; but this risky duty lends to the preaching profession a sense of romance.

The preacher’s privilege is extraordinary. His ministry is not merely in God’s service; it is in the terrifying honour of being God’s mouthpiece. The ministry of the word is the first and most important of ministries, and he is its designated exponent for the congregation. The word of God constitutes the church in its very essence. It calls it into being. And he, the preacher, wields this word – not exclusively or without accountability, but as his calling and duty.

If being a preacher is a joy with many delights, then it is also a burden with many pains. The dramatization of the role of the preacher in the life of the congregation is reflected in Phillip Jensen’s description of the preaching profession as ‘inherently dangerous.’ As he puts it, ‘If we are going to faithful preachers of the very words of God, delivering, explaining and applying his message to the people he has given us to love, we need to be ready for those times when people don’t love us back…This sort of faithfulness will inevitably lead to difficulty, conflict, suffering and persecution.’

The heroism of expository preaching in Sydney has been further shaped by the Katoomba Christian Conventions. The KCC is a non-denominational organisation with evangelical convictions, but Sydney Anglicans have had a substantial influence in it and have been substantially influenced by it. The conventions, especially the Youth Convention which ran from the 1970s until the mid-1990s in January each year, are intended to be a showcase of the best preachers and the best preaching. Though the KCC is non-denominational, Sydney Anglicans were often on the platform. It is the occasional nature and remarkable setting of the convention which means that the preaching heard there lingers long in the memory in a way in which the regular Sunday preaching tends not to.

At Katoomba, preachers like John Chapman, John Woodhouse and Phillip Jensen ministered to thousands of people in their late teens and early adulthood. Those who would fill Moore College to overflowing in the 1990s and 2000s had filled Katoomba’s massive tent in 1980s. It would be very difficult to forget Woodhouse’s remarkable exposition of the book of Leviticus in 1986 as a model of what could be done with the Sydney Anglican method of preaching. Leviticus is perhaps the least promising of all Old Testament books for a sermon series – and especially for a series at a major conference at which the organisers were hoping to attract thousands of young people. And yet, without resorting to a terrible and bizarre legalism, Woodhouse preached this difficult text as though it were God’s word for today.

Though it is something of a habit to bemoan the standard of the preaching, the quality of preaching in ordinary Sydney pulpits is very high. The overwhelming majority of preachers are well-trained (often to postgraduate level), mature and articulate. Even so, there were, for a couple of decades, a small group of local preachers who exemplified what expository preaching could achieve, and whose leadership of the movement as a whole was linked to their presence in the pulpit. Phillip Jensen’s influence was increased by the recording, cataloguing and distribution of tapes of his sermons. After the turn of the millennium, however, this technology was swiftly and rapidly superseded by the advent of mp3s and the internet. It became possible to hear the best of overseas preachers like John Piper, Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller regularly and almost without cost. Each of these men, whose Reformed convictions Sydney Anglicans share, has built enormous ministries in large US cities on a scale unimaginable in Australia. Preachers now preach in an environment where truly extraordinary preaching is available to their congregations in a few quick mouse-clicks.

The visit of Mark Driscoll to Australia in 2008 signalled a sea-change in the local evangelical scene. Some of the responses have seemed panicked. There has been an awful lot of muddle and a diffusion of strategies. The boundary-riding, heroic identity that had belonged to the preacher was now transferred to the figure of the church planter. While church planting is a noble calling, and church planters are indeed preachers, the danger in this transferral is that the nature and priority of the Christian ministry becomes much more managerial. New churches will not begin without good planning and effective management. But they will not be what they really are if listening to the voice of God in the Scriptures is not central to their life together.

I have spoken here about the dramatization of the role of the preacher in the culture of evangelicalism. To point it out is not to deride it. Biblically speaking, the activity of 'preaching' (as we pratice it) is linked to certain offices established by dint of the character of the preacher. I think this dramatization is entirely appropriate in a church or fellowship of churches that wants to be a church that listens to the word of God as its focal point. Where it becomes problematic is when the expectation that there will be rejection and persecution for preachers leads to a deafness to genuinely constructive criticism. The preacher speaks the words of God, but he does so as a fallible and sinful human being. He word he speaks is a word of man as well as a word of God. Sometimes he will be simply inept; at other times, he will be mistaken. He may be confused and inarticulate. He may be in sinful error and simply disobedient. To point out any of these, a person should not be made to feel as if he or she is being directly disobedient to the word of God, or stoking the flames beneath a martyr's pyre. It seriously dishonours the memory of the genuine martyrs to call a little bit of robust disagreement 'persecution' and 'rejection'.

Words and their background

Christians are bound to take words quite seriously and biblical words in particular. This is in particular once we realise that words have peculiar histories. The analysis of words is inevitably a historical exercise - it is diachronic, we might say, as well as synchronic. It is important not only to establish what a particular word means in general usage at a particular time and locale but also to reckon with the way in which a word may be quickly - in a matter of weeks even - be adapted to a new usage and take on new connotations. Some of this can be deliberate, but most of this evolution in words takes place without individuals ever deciding for it to be the case.

A particular term may have an 'ordinary', 'literal' or direct and non-technical sense, but find itself adapted to a technical usage in not very much time at all.

This takes careful observation and delineation in the contemporary world, but it is even more difficult to manage with ancient words. On the one hand, it appears to be a quite easy matter because we can count the number of times a particular Greek word is used in the extent literature, and it is frequently only a matter of, say, fifty instances. When we narrow it down to the period we are looking at to within a century, we may find only a handful. It is then a simple matter, is it not, to decide what the word most often meant, and so what it must mean in the New Testament setting.

Not so fast. One of the obvious difficulties here is that we have no record of oral usage. Furthermore, we can surmise that a great deal of written examples have simply passed from view. So, it seems that the proposed method of totting up the known references to a word in the extant literature is more guesswork than it appears. Now, granted, the evidence available is not nothing or irrelevant; but it is certainly not nearly complete. And when theological edifices are built upon these linguistic foundations, they are liable to fall down at the next puff of wind. Context is always king. Example: I don't happen to think that 'kephale' means 'source' in 1 Cor 11, but it seems to me that it would take an overwhelming mass of counter-examples to overturn the simple pressure of context, if the context was telling us that 'kephale' means 'source'.

In any case, a word can fairly quickly take on a quite specific 'technical' sense in a small group - especially a small group who are making a new identity for themselves out of what they perceive to be the wreckage of the old. We can observe this process in the way that our modern urban tribes quickly adapt old terms and invent new ones to create a special 'in' language that does a job peculiar to their own needs, and establishes and strengthens their identity. And this local and particular setting trumps all when it comes to the meanings of words. It beats the dictionary every time.

How does this relate to the New Testament? One of the exegetical strategies I see employed a great deal is a kind of linguistic primitivism which assumes that any 'technical' senses for words in the NT are actually most likely not there but the effects of us reading through the lens of later Church history. This has especially to do with words that are employed in the institutional life of later Christianity. So, for example, ekklesia originally had the ordinary sense of 'gathering', not Church in the technical sense. So we should not read the word when it appears on the page in its 'special, religious' (=bad and corrupt) sense but in its 'ordinary' sense (such as can be determined of course).

The fallacy here is this (quite apart from the Harnackian negativity towards the notion of an institutional or formally structured church): the texts of the New Testament are written AFTER the application of the particular vocabulary in question and not before it. The notion that baptism was connected to a ritual involving water which symbolised spiritual baptism, for example, PREDATES the composition of Matthew's gospel. It would be impossible to imagine Matthew using the word or his intended audience reading it without the technical inference, since his gospel is not written till a number of decades after the church has got going and has been splashing quite a bit of water about. It is impossible to conceive of a pre-technical, so-called 'ordinary' usage of the word ekklesia. We neglect to our peril the indisputable fact that much of the New Testament postdates the very early church and so more likely reflects its specific, new, even tribalised use of words - which in turn was shaped by the apostolic preaching (which when you think about it is a conceptual revolution of the highest order: sacrifice, victory, temple, redemption - all become completely transformed as concepts under the press of the gospel).

We can also see in the New Testament itself the trajectories along which words are beginning to travel - and we shouldn't assume that where the individual words end up is therefore not sanctioned by the NT. The word 'martyrion' for example (a favourite of mine) is not quite in the NT yet the specific and technical word for 'a person who dies for their Christian belief'. It still has the 'ordinary' sense of 'witness'. But you can see it gathering steam - when Jesus talks to the disciples in John 15, the appearances of the disciples in the law courts as suffering witnesses are clearly on view. Likewise, the blood of the martyrion which cries out from under the altar in Revelation is very close to something like what the word will become later on. The point is this: the job of this observation of words is not scrape away the later accretions as if they are almost always distortions of the true primitive meaning of the word. On the contrary: the later meaning of the word may be a very good clue as to what the earlier meaning was. Or, in fact, the later more technical/official/institutional sense may already be well in view in the NT usage.

Narrawallee

Some photos of our holiday house. We are looking to rent to interested holidaymakers!

Is preaching itself the Word of God?

The following are some notes on Peter Adam's book Speaking God's Words - The Art of Biblical Preaching. I have been asking lately about how the practice of 'preaching' in evangelical circles came to be what it is. A crucial question is: how does preaching relate to the notion of the Word of God? Is it itself the word of God?

Peter Adam addresses this very question on pp. 112ff. He notes how the issue was raised in the 2nd Helvetic Confession of 1566 which states that 'The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God'. Adam notes that this statement - which is actually in the marginalia of the Confession - has been taken as a Reformation axiom by Runia and Bloesch and others. However, Adam suggests that it needs more careful theological treatment. He looks at Bullinger's sermons - since Bullinger was the author the aforemention confession it seems worth asking what Bullinger might have thought he meant. Adam asserts that Bullinger was arguing that 'sermons are the means by which the Word of God is applied to people, not that the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God' (p. 115) in the baldest sense. In the verse usually used to support a closer identification of preaching and the word of God - 1 Thess 2:13 - Paul seems to be speaking about his particular authority as an apostle rather than his more general role as a preacher. (He doesn't discuss 1 Peter 4:11: 'If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God' I note). Adam deduces: 'it may be fair to infer that when we preach Paul's words we are preaching the Word of God, but it does not necessarily follow that our preaching is in itself the Word of God' (p. 115).

For Adam, too high a view of preaching as the Word of God may cause problems because it may herald the beginning of a Protestant papacy. Too close an identification of the preacher's human words with 'the Word of God' gives the preaching itself unwarranted and apparently underived authority. Preaching is authoritative and divinely inspired (we might say) and ought to be received as such inasmuch as it is derived from and faithful to the divinely inspired text. (Should we speak of 'preaching the Word of God' - with Scripture remaining the Word of God that is so preached - rather than preaching being the Word of God?)

Adam writes:
Perhaps the best way of describing it is to say that when human beings explain the Word of God, preach it, teach it, and urge people to accept it, then the Word of God achieves its purpose and this is on eof the normal ways in which God brings his Word to human beings. It is perhaps helpful to describe this in terms of the work of the Spirit. ... The Scripture itself is a product of the Spirit, and when the Spirit works in the preacher and in the hearers, the words of God are mediated and bear fruit in the lives of those who hear. (p. 118)

If our preaching is true to Scripture it will be the means by which God brings the Word of God to those who hear us. (p. 120) .... and thus, we can speak, I think, of preaching as the Word of God when it is preaching of the Word of God.

Should we use the word 'metaphor' in talking about the cross?

Yes, I think so. We should use the word 'metaphor' (although I am happy with 'models' or 'analogies' I guess - see JI Packer) because:

1 - 'descriptions' as a term simply does not tell us what is going in in the relationship between the words and their meaning.

2 - 'metaphor' reminds us that the language being used is being stretched beyond its ordinary sphere of reference, and so we need to be careful in how we use it. If we fail to see that the langauge is metaphorical in nature, we distort it badly.

3 - metaphors are a not to be afeard of. They can be a precise way communicating actual, real things. In fact, they are ideally suited to expressing things that are new or singular in human experience. Like the atonement.

4 - that the langauge of the NT re the atonement is metaphorical allows us to see how the different metaphors moderate and shape one another - especially when we see Paul stringing his metaphors together, as in Rom 3:21-31. If we just say these are 'descriptions', then we are not likely to be as aware of how this goes on in the Scriptural texts.

The 'ransom' example shows how everything can go badly wrong if we don't reckon with the metaphorical nature of the language we are using. Jesus' death IS ransom-ish - it can be understood as resembling that interaction between human beings that we name 'ransom', but if we press the metaphor too far (which the Bible doesn't do) we start making theologically dangerous statements about the devil being paid a ransom price and so on.

Now what about sacrifice?

Nothing on the surface about Jesus' death was sacrificial, in the usual sense of the word. He did not apparently die 'for' anyone, in the sense that a lifesaver might die trying to save a drowning person. It just looked like an ordinary execution. There was no religious ritual. It happened outside the temple, not in it. There was not an offering priest. There was a human and not an animal victim (expressly forbidden in the OT). It is very different to a sacrifice as the Jews (and the pagans) knew it. Right?

So when we hear Jesus himself and the other NT writers refering to Jesus' death as a sacrifice, we know that some stretching and rennovating of the concept of sacrifice is going on. And so it proves: Jesus's death on the cross is yoked to the notion of sacrifice familiar to Israel from its history and from its religious life; and it is done in such a remarkable way that the very notion of sacrifice itself is completely transformed! Hebrews has to show how Jesus is both priest AND sacrifice in order to make it work. In what previously known sacrificial system was this the case? Jesus calls his body 'the temple' (it's a metaphor again!) in order to indicate that now serves the function of and discplaces the original temple.

This is part of our difficulty here: the yoking of the idea of 'sacrifice' to Jesus' death has so transformed our human thinking about sacrifice (at least in the Judaeo-Christian west) that we find it hard to imagine a way of thinking about sacrifice without Jesus' death. (see Nick Colyer's comment)

Further, we feel uneasy with the term 'metaphor' because we want to know (rightly) that the Biblical langauge is a) not random and b) describes actual things that occurred between us and God and not just pictures of the possibility of something occurring. But furrow not your brows: a) the metaphors are NOT random, but revealed and inspired and b) they do depict real and actual things that occurred.

Was the death of Jesus a sacrifice, actually? Well, yes: but not like one that has ever been made before or since. By calling it a sacrifice the NT writers have helped us to relearn what sacrifice actually means all over again!