Christianity

J. I. Packer Splits with the Anglicans of Canada

From The Vancouver Sun:

One of the world’s most famous evangelical theologians quit the Anglican Church of Canada this week because he believes many of its bishops are “arguably heretical” for adhering to “poisonous liberalism.”

James Packer, whom Time magazine recently named as one of the planet’s 25 most influential evangelicals, said he hesitated before using the harsh terms to describe the Anglican bishops, but believed he must do so in the name of truth.

Vancouver-based Packer, who has sold more than four million copies of his many books, said he and 10 other B.C. Anglican clergy left the national denomination this week to operate under the authority of a South American Anglican archbishop because they felt they were being “starved out and worn down.”

After reading the excerpt above, you may be thinking: “I thought the split within the Anglican Communion was about homosexuality, not liberalism.” Well, it’s about both. The Anglican Communion is being split apart because the liberal wing of the church is willing to ignore or distort the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. At bottom, this is a question of biblical authority, and the liberal wing of the Communion has rejected that.

3 Comments

  • Joshua

    I have a friend, of whom left the Anglican church to come to a Southern Baptist church, and later a Non-demonational charismatic church. I asked him several months about the split within the Anglican church, and he said that from his point of view the media makes it about homosexuality, but the reality is as you said, the stem of Liberalism, and the acceptance of homosexuality is just one of the many issues coming from that problem.

    Not a Anglican myself, I cannot properly reply, but however I can see what he means, and what Packer is saying here as well.

  • Nick

    As OS Guinness has said(though this may not have originated with him), “He who marries the spirit of the age, shall soon become a widower”.

    The Anglican communion has pledged it’s devotion to the modern era and in so doing has (as Guinness put it), “[Cut] itself off from the universal faith that spans the centuries and the continents, it becomes culturally captive to one culture and one time”.

    For further reading, I strongly recommend OS Guinness’s article on why he left the Episcopal church:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/07/AR2007010700982.html

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