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39 articles

Universal Salvation?

March 3, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
There seems to be a sense that the eighteenth of the articles stands between the preceding set on salvation, and those that follow on the Church. Its primary stress is, I think, the uniqueness of Christ as Saviour, so fitting the [...]

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Where angels fear to tread – a different and divine election

February 26, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
I begin with two disclaimers. For myself, I am no expert on such abstruse theological topics, nor do I find them congenial. Additionally, I suspect most Anglicans have hardly if at all heard of predestination, and the presence of article 17 [...]

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Anglicans read it in church: Bible and Apocrypha revisted

February 20, 2010

I noticed when casting my eye over the C of E’s General Synod reports in this week’s Church Times (sorry the link’s behind a firewall till next week) that there’d been what looked like a fairly unsatisfactory debate on the lectionary. Now admittedly lectionaries rather appeal to the anorak tendency of the church, but hidden [...]

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That’s unforgivable?

February 16, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
I have sometimes been very concerned for people who worry that they have committed the “sin against the Holy Spirit” or “the unforgivable sin”: a term which has stuck in their mind as a particular category of sin. It seems sometimes [...]

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Sinless? Who and how?

February 8, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
I start this post on Article XV slightly baffled as to what its doing there in the first place. As far as I know (which isn’t, in all honesty, all that far) there were no significant debates about Christ’s unique state [...]

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God is not a bean-counter of good deeds

February 5, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
Ever since I was child, I’ve loved words, and can still remember the first big word that fascinated me, thanks to the hymns at my parents’ church — consubstantial, as sung in a number of doxologies. Nicene Christianity, provider of big [...]

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Doing away with a mean-minded God

January 23, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
Sometimes I wish I’d never started this series on the Anglican articles. I certainly feel like that when faced with what I find to be the viscerally repellent phrasing of the thirteenth. (I hope that my sense of repulsion has not [...]

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Getting good works wrong

January 18, 2010

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
I thought I ought to get back to this series after more than a month away from it. We have arrived at the twelfth article, so there’s still a long way to go. This one is on “Good Works”, and is [...]

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Justification: catholic Scripture’s challenge to Protestant tradition?

December 5, 2009

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
It seems time that I got back to this meandering series of mine on the Anglican articles. We’ve reached the 11th, on justification. Written in the context of late mediaeval debates, it also plunges us into some very modern debates as [...]

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Twelve reasons to be very very afraid? (In Peterborough)

November 13, 2009

Today’s Church Times column by the pugnaciously liberal Giles Fraser made me want to look up the new bishop-designate of Peterborough for myself. Okay, his series on the 39 articles is twelve years old, and he could have changed his mind in a number of ways, but this is what he was teaching in 1997. [...]

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