Rob mentioned it at the fourth year Anglican candidates dinner at Bishopscourt the other day, and outlines his thoughts on Sydney Anglicans here. Sounds great.

The aim is to provide a variety of contemporary and more traditional/formal resources and training on running church gatherings.

The issue of family size is influenced by a wide variety of factors, not the least of them being the in-laws’ expectations. At a recent engagement party, in his congratulatory speech, the father of the groom-to-be announced that he was delighted that he could look forward to a family football team! The look on the bride-to-be’s face, and her mother’s, indicated that a large family was not something that the young woman was planning on.

The interesting thing about this article is that it assumes, without a second thought, that we not only have the means to decide on family size (by use of contraception, etc) but that we also have the prerogative to choose when and how many children we have.

Is that right?

Not only do some couples struggle to have children (as one commenter points out), but perhaps we too quickly assume that we also have the God-given right to decide when children ought to come, in terms of saying ‘No’ until we’re ready.

I’m not suggesting we don’t have that prerogative, but there’s a large amount of unreflective assumption going on behind that kind of thinking; perhaps we need to sift through these issues again as Protestants.

One thing I love is that he’s young enough (and honest enough) to admit that Don Carson is a big influence. Carson is a big influence on everyone, and it’s great to hear someone say it.

Concerning Wright, you’ll see that Bird says that Wright has given Jesus back to evangelicals. I’ll let you watch the vid.

Well, that makes you want to read Jesus and the Victory of God, doesn’t it?!

Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with Jesus. I wish he’d say more about substitutionary atonement, about the meaning of his resurrection, and about salvation by grace.

But Jesus won’t allow himself to be easily contained and categorised by my twenty-first century, white, Australian, evangelical perspective, and he certainly won’t allow himself to be the precursor to the apostle Paul.

Peter Jensen, archbishop of Sydney deals with this issue in his masterful apologetic book, The Future of Jesus , which is a print version of the 2005 ABC Boyer Lectures, by Dr Jensen. (You can download the MP3s or the transcripts of the lectures free from the site.)

After pointing out that Jesus is so much a tacit part of Australia culture, though invisible, that leading academic lights can quote Abraham Lincoln and not realise that Lincoln is quoting Christ (though Lincoln and his audience would have been well aware of this), Jensen makes a case for why the lectures ought to be about Jesus, how he forms a significant but under-appreciated part of our culture.

In the second lecture, he looks to Jesus himself, particularly Jesus’ message, which is difficult for 21st century people to grasp:

If you asked for a popular summary of the teaching of Jesus, then “Love one another” would almost certainly be the reply. Perhaps, to bring it right up to date, the reply would be: “Include one another and don’t discriminate; give everyone a fair go and be good mates”. But if you had asked Jesus to summarise his own teaching, he would have said: “God’s kingdom is near: get ready for it.”

Jensen then embarks on a brilliant exposition of what that meant in its first century Palestinian context, and then shows why that message is still unshakeably significant today.

This is great, because all evangelical Christians know that Jesus is the real thing, the utter centre of our faith, but it takes helpful guides like Wright and Jensen (in their own ways) to re-convince us, and show us exactly how that works.

Images via Theology and Culture, Moore Books, and Matthias Media respectively.

In the meantime, Luke has begun sharing some thoughts from his project, which is an analysis of Tim Keller’s preaching. Sounds fascinating. Head of Theology at Moore College, Mark Thompson, also recently blogged about Keller on preaching.

Does anyone know where I can do a Myers-Briggs test (a proper one)?

Soph discusses the financial costs of raising children.

A Christian visits a creation museum with a group of atheists, and is disgusted by how the atheists are treated. Another demonstration of why I’m glad I’m not American (but thankful for the massive positive contributions the US has made to the world).

I’ve subscribed to a new blog by Adam Ferrier, Consumer Psychologist, which is kind of a meatier version of The Gruen Transfer without the crass humour. His undercover on the WANT LONGER LASTING SEX people is funny and desperately tragic at the same time. Just like this mock ad he posted previously.

And finally, the hilarious and irreverent Michael Bird gives us the best arguments for why Romans 7 is not about Christian experience. That’s the passage that goes, “I do not do what I want to do, and what I do not want to do, I do.” Not about Paul as a Christian he reckons (as do most scholars), and here’s why.

H/t to all those people who linked to these things who I can’t remember, and hello to CraigS’s link feed readership, who I love and address infrequently.

Via SydAng.

In last night’s lecture, on one of the ‘fathers of Anglicanism,’ Richard Hooker, Dr Null brought us three gems on Anglicanism, grounded in his historical studies, but with much relevance for today. I’ve padded these out a little to make them more explicit.

The first was in answering questions from the previous lecture before he began. It was, “Given Thomas Cranmer wrote the homilies to be read out in Anglican churches in place of what we would call sermons, if he were alive today, would he be using video broadcasting technology to beam a sermon from him or someone else to various ‘campuses’, a la Mark Driscoll?”

After mentioning that he needed to find out who Mark Driscoll is, he said that certainly Cranmer would have made use of any technology available. The printing press was hi-tech back in the day, and the means by which the Reformers in Europe and England spread their message and reordered their churches.

Having said that, the reason for the production and distribution of the homilies was that there were very, very few available preachers. This was in a time when Reformed theological education was still in its infancy, particularly in England, and homilies were to be read in churches in place of a sermon where there was not a licensed preacher.

Of course, in our day, we have preachers aplenty, and so the impetus for Cranmer’s initiative doesn’t exist.

Good answer.

The second was regarding the spread of Anglicanism. The Reformers were having to work out how to read the Bible, after centuries of obfuscated hermeneutics. Cranmer and Hooker believed that the Bible was prescriptive on all matters concerning salvation, but only descriptive concerning church polity (organisation and structure) and worship (liturgy etc).

John Knox, on the other hand, saw the Bible as dictating not only matters of salvation, but how churches ought to function and worship. He split with Cranmer on Hooker on this issue (illustrated in a fascinating anecdote from the time).

This accounts for the spread of Anglicanism: that at its heart, it was committed to preaching a gospel core, repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus for salvation, while being flexible about how to govern church and structure services. You see this in the Book of Common Prayer, whenever this phrase appears, “… or as is fitting, according to local custom.”

This is exactly what we’re about in Sydney: uncompromising gospel preaching and discipleship, while making every effort to be culturally sensitive and contextualising the form of church gatherings and structures to suit the local community.

Nice.

It gets better.

Third, again in question time, and in answer to a question by Michael Jensen, Ashley explained why the Anglican communion has held together for so long, but is now fragmenting. This is so right, that as soon as he said it, I thought, “That’s exactly it,” and yet I’d never heard this explanation before.

In Anglicanism there has long been three vibrant strands, the Anglo-Catholic strand, the broad church (middle ground), and the strongly Reformed low church (Sydney). These three are very different to each other. How has the communion survived for so long? What have these strands in common? Theology? Obviously not.

The answer is… morality.

The Anglican church was a state-church, and a government generally doesn’t care about theology; it cares about the church promoting morality amongst the populace. As Anglicanism was separated from the state, as it developed and spread throughout the world, this commitment to morality was the thing that was held in common by the divergent strands of the denomination.

This explains why the church is now fragmenting, probably irrevocably. Because The Episcopal Church in the USA has, over the last few years, completely abandoned moral teaching which has never been questioned before in the history of the church, They have profoundly compromised themselves by uncritically adopting contemporary secular ideas of right and wrong, and calling those ideas ‘good’. (Article by Robert Tong.) Indeed, it is becoming ‘immoral’ to argue for biblical and traditional notions of morality, because it’s deemed unjust to say that homosexuality is wrong, for example.

As the church loses its common notions of morality, the communion unwinds, for the first time.

Perhaps this will allow a new, stripped back communion, to properly unite around theology for the first time.

Bravo to Ashley Null. He’s also a clear-as-crystal speaker.

Don’t miss this.