Confessing Evangelical

A revealing quote (from 1992) from the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, in which he rather "gives the game away" about where ecumenism is heading:

I’d like to argue, you know, that the broad church that we are now is probably a foretaste of what is to come. If we want to think about the coming great church, then it is going to be one in which we have to accept huge differences within the family, and we are not going to have final answers this side of eternity. Living with differences, I think, is actually the genius of Anglicanism (quoted in C of E: The State It's In by Monica Furlong, p.162).

Setting aside the question of how much credibility Anglicanism retains in 2004 as a model of "living with differences", it is striking to compare Dr Carey's statement with Dr Hermann Sasse's observations in a private letter to a group of LCMS pastors in 1964, in which he refers to:

...the rising world unionism ... the raging currents of a world syncretism in which the substance of the Christian faith will vanish and in which the Church of the Gospel will perhaps exist "as a cottage in a vineyard ... as a besieged city" (Is. 1:8), as small minority groups comparable to the remnants of the old Christian churches in the post-Christian, Mohammedan era of the Orient, or as the oppressed churches in the Communist world today. For this will be the true destiny of the true Church of Christ even if the phantastic plans of the "One World Church" under the leadership of Rome should be realized.

This outcome is made more likely by the abandonment of the Gospel (as set out with a greater or lesser degree of purity in the various Reformation confessions) by so many Protestant churches:

Modern Protestantism has lost almost entirely with the confessions of the Fathers also the understanding of what a confession of the Church is. This is true of the Anglicans, the vast majority of the Presbyterian and Reformed (Switzerland, Holland) Churches, the Congregationalists, the majority of the Baptists, the Methodists. With the loss of their confessions, these churches are disappearing in the great union churches of our age. Only remains of them will survive.

"The coming great church" is a stirring phrase, which appeals to the theologian of glory in us all. It sounds so much more appealing than the church we have today - battered, unimpressive, hidden under the cross, "by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed".

But Dr Sasse is a true theologian of the cross, who "calls the thing what it actually is" (Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 21). The "coming great church" is in fact simply "the great union church", the "church" in which the truth of the Gospel is sacrificed for the sake of an external, institutional unity; nothing more than a symptom of the "rising world unionism", "the raging currents of ... world syncretism", and the human, fleshly desire to "wow" the world with big numbers and impressive organisations. By contrast:

Our Lord has always shown a remarkable predilection for small numbers and little flocks. Instead of organizing vast evangelistic campaigns He has, in the terms of modern missiology, wasted His time by seeking the individual, leaving the ninety-nine in the desert for the one lost sheep. We modern Christians seem sometimes to think and act as if He said: "Where two or three millions are gathered in my name..."

It is still difficult, in some ways, for me to adjust to being in a synod which is smaller than the combined membership of my five previous churches, so I found Dr Sasse's reminder of our Lord's "remarkable predilection for small numbers and little flocks" particularly comforting.

"The coming great church"? Count me out, George.