The New Puritans

Muriel Porter

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522851847
• eBook ISBN: 9780522865721
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

CHAPTER ONE

‘TRUE BELIEVERS’: COMPLETING THE REFORMATION

The Diocese of Sydney claims to have almost a third of all Australian Anglicans, and although other dioceses have seen a continuous erosion in church attendance figures, Sydney’s have been solidly increasing. The diocese is currently consumed by its grand ‘Mission’, its project to have 10 per cent of Sydney’s population worshipping in ‘Bible-believing’ churches within a decade; that is, by 2011. The Mission, launched by Archbishop Peter Jensen almost immediately he became archbishop in 2001, is a telling symbol of what the diocese now stands for and of its underlying ideology. The Mission is staggeringly ambitious, given that 10 per cent of Sydneysiders represents about 400,000 people. If the Mission achieves its goal, at least another 300,000 people will have to be attracted into church membership in just a few short years, if the most optimistic current membership estimates are correct, in 2002 Peter Jensen estimated that 1.5 per cent of Sydney’s population—60,000 people—were attending Anglican churches at that stage, a rather generous figure given that just a year earlier the National Church Life Survey put Sydney Anglican attendance at 52,000. He added an estimated 40,000 Sydneysiders already attending other ‘Bible-believing’ churches to provide an overall attendance of 100,000 at the start of the Mission.1

The Mission’s primary strategy is to ‘multiply fellowships’; that is, to create as many as a thousand new church congregations of varying sizes and styles. To staff these new communities, new pastoral workers—a thousand full-time and up to 10,000 part-time—need to be trained, and Sydney’s Moore Theological College will expand so that it can eventually train a thousand students at a time. That will require the college to more than triple in size, given that it had 305 students enrolled m 2005. Such an extraordinary program will cost a great deal of money, so a radical reprioritising of the diocese’s financial resources has been underway. The resources are significant, as Sydney has an annual income from investments and other sources of about $15 million, not including the substantial income from endowments that pay all the costs associated with its clerical hierarchy—archbishop, bishops, dean and archdeacons—and the diocese’s management; that is, its registrar and registry staff. This makes Sydney rich beyond the dreams of other Australian dioceses, which is the result of a far-reaching financial reorganisation begun in the late 1950s and expertly overseen since. The next largest diocese, Melbourne, struggles along with not much more than $1 million per year from its investments. The major portion of Melbourne’s income has to be raised from a levy on all the parish income, something that Sydney Diocese does not have to do. This means that Sydney parishes have significantly more income to spend on their local work than parishes in other dioceses. However, the costs of the Mission program will far exceed even Sydney’s current resources; some estimates suggest it could cost as much as $500 million over ten years.2 The archbishop has been quick to point out that the priority of the Mission has not detracted from traditional community pastoral care, such as that offered by the diocese’s welfare arm, Anglicare Sydney. Yet Anglicare Sydney posted a $3 million deficit in 2005, which led to a reduction in its services in many areas, including the hospital and prison chaplaincy budget, which was reduced by $500,000. Although Archbishop Jensen refuted the idea, some Sydney commentators saw Anglicare’s predicament as directly related to the dominance of the Mission.3

The ‘Bible-believing’ churches Archbishop Jensen has included in the Mission plan do not encompass the other two large mainstream denominations—the Catholic Church and the Uniting Church—or any of the Orthodox churches. Instead, they are smaller, reformed churches of a narrower kind, churches that ‘owe their theological structure to the Reformation, and who thus see their fundamental authority in the great “scripture alone” of the Reformation’, as Jensen explained.4 These are churches that trace their lineage from the sixteenth-century break with the Roman Catholic Church and/or whose theological basis is that the Bible—generally interpreted narrowly—is the only authority to which they are answerable. In other words, they owe no allegiance to church tradition, let alone to the hierarchical authority of a pope or other overarching leader. In practice, this means the churches that belong, with Sydney, to the conservative, Protestant New South Wales Council of Churches: the Baptist Union of New South Wales, Churches of Christ, the Christian Reformed Church, the Fellowship of Congregational Churches, the Presbyterian Church and the Salvation Army.5

Christianity has always been a missionary religion, committed to spreading the ‘Good News’ (gospel) of Jesus Christ as required in the writings of the New Testament. St Matthews Gospel ends by portraying Jesus commanding his disciples to ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’.6 The origin of the term ‘evangelical’—to evangelise—reflects its missionary priority. But this restriction of the Mission’s planned converts to a select group of Protestant churches is the key to understanding the purpose of the Mission and provides a powerful indicator of the primary theological motivation behind Sydney’s attitudes and behaviour. Put starkly, Sydney Diocese wants to bring 400,000 people into certain Protestant churches because they offer the only kind of Christianity that Sydney Anglicans believe is acceptable, rather than the ‘suspect’ teachings they would encounter in the Catholic or Uniting Churches, for instance. Peter Jensen has said the real goal should be 100 per cent of Sydneysiders,7 and although he knows this is impossible, the very suggestion is proof that to Jensen and his supporters, anyone who does not accept the Christian Gospel on their very specific terms is not really Christian.

In terms of their theological understanding, there is no uncertainty or humility in the Sydney mindset! Sydney Anglicans are utterly dogmatic about their religious convictions, and brook no challenge. No mainstream Church member would have any problem with a whole-hearted desire and commitment to evangelise the people of Sydney and draw them to the God of love. It is an entirely worthy agenda and one that most Christians would believe is commanded by the Gospel. But I have real misgivings about the narrowness of the Sydney evangelisation plan. It suggests that people can be ‘real’ Christians only if they conform to the strict theological principles these acceptable Churches espouse. The plan is also seriously anti-ecumenical, a strange phenomenon in the twenty-first century after more than half a century of intense activity among Christian Churches around the world towards greater understanding and mutual respect, if not outright reunion.

Outlining in detail the rationale for the Mission in his 2002 Synod Address, Jensen referred to those outside Bible-believing churches as ‘the lost’. They are condemned to a ‘miserable’ fate, he said, explaining that nothing is more important for them than ‘their need to know Christ and be saved from the wrath to come’. That is why the diocese needs to focus on this program at all costs and above all other priorities, because it is focused on what he proclaims to be the number one human priority. Other churches that do not accept this priority and the theological position driving it are plainly wrong, according to Jensen. ‘Many in the church now believe that salvation comes to all automatically, without exception and without need for faith in Jesus,’ he continued. ‘I can only respond that they do not understand the cross of Christ and its absolutely central significance for the history of the world and the redemption of sinners. Nor do they understand the witness of the Bible to the sinfulness of our race, and the hopelessness of our saving panaceas, religious or secular.’8 Does this claim imply that the vast bulk of the worlds Christian churches—including the largest of all, the Catholic Church—are in serious error, leading their people not just astray but also to eternal damnation?

If other Christian churches are in error, how much more are other major world faiths: Islam, Judaism and Hinduism? Most Christians, even conservative evangelicals, avoid direct confrontations over the issue and seek opportunities for sensitive dialogue. Not so Sydney In his first sermon as Dean of Sydney in March 2003, Peter Jensen’s brother Phillip created controversy when he declared that the religions of Hindus, Muslims and Jews ‘cannot all be right’. That might of course be true, but his further comments shocked many: ‘Some, or all of them, are wrong, and if wrong are the monstrous lies and deceits of Satan, devised to destroy the life of the believers, to capture them into the cosmic rebellion against God and to destroy the freedom they should have in Christ,’ he said. Stretching social tolerance into religious or philosophical relativism was ‘stupid’.9

Nor was he alone in his views. As the media reported the understandably angry reactions of leaders of other religions, as well as of more moderate Christians, a Sydney diocesan assistant bishop defended the Dean. Bishop Robert Forsyth, often used as the diocese’s official spokesperson, backed Jensen’s comments unreservedly. His views were not new, he said, in a tacit acknowledgement that they were the long-held views of the diocese. They were consistent with the New Testament, he said: ‘outside of Christ people are enslaved to sin or to spiritual forces’. He added: ‘If all people have a terrible disease and you believe that God has provided a particular cure for everybody that worked—but others were hawking cures that didn’t work—you can’t just say it doesn’t matter. It’s false and it’s dangerously false in a spiritual sense.’10 Media analysis of the furore noted that in the past, Phillip Jensen had also been critical of one other Christian tradition as not being a ‘true religion’. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Kelly Burke reported that Jensen had previously described Catholicism as ‘sub-Christian’ in both its doctrine and practice, and called it an ‘unrepentant persecutor of the gospel’.11

The ‘uniqueness of Jesus’ is something that Sydney Anglicans—along with other conservative Christians—are passionate about. Put simply, they maintain that Jesus’ redemptive death on the Cross redeems only those who explicitly and consciously make a faith commitment to him. The classical Christian position is rather more nuanced: Redemption is only through Jesus, yes, but that does not require explicit faith in him, but rather is effective wherever Gods love evokes a response. The issue, in terms of their own understanding, however, has become one of the hallmarks of the ‘true Christian’ for Sydney. It provided an excellent opportunity for Sydney Anglican leaders to criticise Peter Carnley at the time of his election and installation as Primate. In April 2000 he was accused of denying the uniqueness of Jesus as the only path to human salvation in an article he had written for The Bulletin.12 In the article, Carnley discussed Christian salvation m terms of divine forgiveness, pointing out that the risen Jesus had returned in loving forgiveness to the very people who had crucified him. This made Jesus ‘uniquely significant as the bearer of salvation for those who had mistreated him’, Carnley explained subsequently.13 This uniqueness of Jesus was not just a matter of contrast with other world religions, which had either not existed at the time or not been known to the New Testament writers, his article argued. A range of Sydney Anglican commentators blasted the original Bulletin article on a number of grounds, including what they claimed was Carnley’s denial of salvation through Jesus alone. The then Archbishop of Sydney, Harry Goodhew, said the article appeared to overturn traditional Anglican teaching.14

A number of Sydney clergy used the Bulletin article as the springboard to call for a boycott of Carnley’s installation as Primate, which was to take place in Sydney on 30 April. One of the clergy calling for boycott was Phillip Jensen, then rector of a Sydney parish, St Matthias’, Centennial Park, in a long and detailed article published on the Anglican Media Sydney website, he first took issue with Carnley’s theology before declaring that a boycott would be ‘a small symbolic part to play ... in a long fight that we must now clearly engage in. The alternative is to withdraw wholly from a largely apostate denomination.’15 In the event, although most Sydney regional bishops did not attend the installation, St Andrew’s Cathedral was packed to the doors as more moderate Sydney Anglicans, sparked by the boycott calls, made a concerted effort to attend, along with visiting bishops, clergy and laity from other dioceses. In his later apologia, Carnley wisely avoided a full-scale discussion on the topic of salvation through Christ alone, instead cryptically pointing out that the ‘prerogative of separating the sheep from the goats belongs to God alone. We humans need to use a little caution before presuming to exercise the judgement that belongs to God.’16

In the furore against Carnley’s views, Sydney Anglicans regularly asserted that he was denying Anglican teaching, and in particular the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. Increasingly in Sydney, commitment to the Articles is used as a yardstick of orthodoxy. For instance, Moore Theological College’s website declares that its faculty endorses ‘the Protestant Reformed tradition as expressed in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion’, before going on to say that ‘it therefore accepts the Scriptures as God’s written Word, and as containing all that is necessary for salvation’.17

The Thirty-nine Articles are the product of compromise, arising from a politically fraught sixteenth-century process whereby the Church of England, under Queen Elizabeth I, set down its view in relation to the theological controversies of the time. Finalised in 1571 and unchanged since then, the Articles are a set of ‘short summaries of dogmatic tenets’.18 It must be remembered that the Articles are, except in minor detail, the same as the Forty-two Articles defined in 1553, during the reign of King Edward VI, England’s first Protestant monarch. His reign—which we will explore in more detail below—represents the purity of true Protestant Anglicanism for the Sydney mindset, which explains the symbolism of adherence to the Articles. Anglican lay people are not required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, and clergy have not had to subscribe to them in full since 1865.19

To my mind the Articles are a quaintly worded, seriously limited summary of Anglican understandings of faith and doctrine, which are scarcely relevant to modern Australian life. In some areas, they are now directly contradictory to current Christian teaching. For instance, Article Thirty-seven declares that ‘the laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences’—hardly a teaching to attract much support these days among most Australian Anglicans. They also reflect the strong anti-Catholicism of sixteenth-century England. Article Nineteen says that ‘the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith’, while Article Twelve weighs in against certain ‘Romish doctrines’, which it describes as being ‘a fond thing vainly invented ... repugnant to the Word of God’. I acknowledge that theologians who have studied them closely take a more positive view. Dr Charles Sherlock, an Australian theologian of note, regards the Articles of Religion highly. They ‘speak to what matters and use pastoral criteria for truth’, he writes.20 However, without recourse to scholarly analysis, the majority of modern-day Anglicans, if they have even heard of them, regard the Articles as an interesting but dated historical record.

In elevating the Articles to a position just below holy writ, on the other hand, Sydney Anglicans deliberately link themselves to the struggles of the English Protestant Reformation. It has been said of a former Sydney archbishop, Marcus Loane (archbishop from 1966 to 1982) that, for him, ‘the sixteenth century was not so long ago’,21 and the same could be said of his successors. At one level, Sydney Anglicans are still fighting Reformation battles, although this time against ‘apostate’ Anglicans rather than the Church of Rome. They believe they represent real Anglicanism as it was established in the Reformation under Edward VI and that other kinds of Anglican—High-Church and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, liberal and progressive Anglicans, moderate evangelical Anglicans and even ‘broad church’ middle-of-the-road everyday Anglicans such as would represent the vast majority of the Church’s members in the Western world—are aberrations. Certainly, Sydney Anglicans see themselves as the direct heirs of the Elizabethan Puritans, those English Protestants who were dismayed that, to their minds, the final form of the Protestant Reformation in England was half-baked.

Protestantism first gained a serious foothold in England during the brief reign of the sickly boy-king, Edward VI, who reigned from 1547 to 1553. Under Edwards father, Henry VIII, the Reformation was a political, dynastic exercise. Henry broke with Rome so that he could annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon—a plan expressly forbidden by the Pope—and marry his sweetheart, Anne Boleyn, in a vain attempt to father a male heir. In the event, his only surviving legitimate son was born not to the ill-fated Anne, mother of Queen...

Table of contents

• THE NEW PURITANS
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CONCLUSION: THE NEW PURITANS
• NOTES
• INDEX