Against the Docetic heresy, the writer of II John stated the following,

Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist. Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully. Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him. (II John 1:7-9)

True doctrine affirmed that Christ came in the flesh, false doctrine that he did not. Those who believed the true doctrine were to have nothing to do with those who taught the false doctrine.

At the time of the Arian heresy, the church, at the Council of Nicea in 325, promoted an orthodox creed which set forth Christian truth and denied in explicit language the claims of the Arians. The creed ended with these words:

But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or is subject to alteration or change -- these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.(1)

The creed adopted at Nicea set forth true doctrine and explicitly denied the false teaching of the Arians. Further, consistent with what went before and after, the orthodox could not be in eucharistic fellowship with the Arians.

At the time of the Reformation, the Anglican Reformers defined Anglican doctrine and practice in the Articles of Religion. In 1571, these were made binding on the Church. Anyone seeking ordination was required to subscribe to the Articles. The Articles set forth true doctrine, and further, they clearly defined and denied the errors of both Rome and the Anabaptists. In regard to the original forty-one articles, W.H. Griffith Thomas concludes,

They must be judged by their character and contents, and when this is done we see two things quite clearly: first Roman errors are definitely condemned (Articles XII, XIII, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXV, XXVI, XXX); second, the Anabaptists who caused serious trouble by their excesses are also condemned (Articles VI, VIII, XIV, XV, XXXVII). So that the true and fair explanation is that these Articles represent the Church of England view of the time on the points treated in light of the necessities of the Reformation. In opposition to Roman and Anabaptist errors they state the position of the Reformers.(2)

Again, the orthodox response to false teaching was to affirm Christian truth and specifically deny false doctrine and practice. Further, as is well known, Rome and the Anglican Church broke eucharistic fellowship.

Where then, do we stand today? Within the United States a number of Anglican groups have recently broken eucharistic fellowship with the Episcopal Church. This is necessary. Further, these bodies have, in their statements of faith, set forth orthodox teaching from an Anglican perspective. They do so by affirming such things as the authority of Scripture, the normative role of creeds, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Anglican Formularies. This is also necessary. I have not seen, however, where any separated body has clearly defined the essence of Episcopal false teaching and then condemned its errors. That is why the Anglican Formularies are not enough. We must not only affirm the historic Anglican Formularies, but also define and deny the false teaching of the revisionists. Is this really necessary?

It is necessary because every historical period and every culture creates its heresies, and these, often without our awareness, distort the faith. This means that Christians can believe in God, interpret the Bible, and worship together, all the while affirming and practicing something other than the Christian faith. Here is Hooker,

Against which poison [heresies] likewise if we think that the Church at this day needeth not those ancient preservatives [creeds] which ages before us were so glad to use, we deceive ourselves greatly. The weeds of heresy being grown unto such ripeness as that was, do even in the very cutting down scatter oftentimes those seeds which for a while lie unseen and buried in the earth, but afterward freshly spring up again no less pernicious than at the first. (V,xlii,13)

As a result, the church must always reform itself and do so theologically. This is especially important at the present moment. The heresy that confronts the church is a form of revisionism. Revisionists accept Scripture, creeds, and the historic formularies of Anglicanism. Yet they interpret them from a perspective alien to the Christian faith. This allows them to be revised in an unorthodox fashion. Against such distortions, it does little good to insist on the authority of Scripture, or proclaim the Formularies as Anglican norms. The revisionists already understand all that. They think they are being faithful to Scripture and to the Anglican tradition.

Scripture, creeds, and Formularies must be affirmed, but more is required. The fundamental errors of the revisionists must be exposed and denied. That is what the church has always done. That is what we must do today. Let me give an example of how that can happen. Let us consider the St. Andrew's Draft, the covenant proposed for the Anglican Communion.

This draft was written by a committee called together by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The goal of the committee was, in the words of Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the committee's head, "to state concisely and clearly the faith that we have all inherited together, so that there can be a new confidence that we are about the same mission."(3) Two of the committee members represented the Episcopal Church, one of whom was an author of "To Set Our Hope on Christ," the document justifying homosexual unions. What then did this group affirm in the St. Andrew's Draft? They affirmed the foundational documents of Anglicanism, Scripture, creeds, and Formularies. They affirmed Anglican forms, the episcopate, Eucharist, and shared patterns of worship.

How could this have happened when some members of this committee represented a church that has abandoned the Christian faith? It happened because revisionists accept, affirm, and endorse the founding documents of Anglicanism, but they interpret them from an alien perspective that amounts to a distortion of Christian truth.

What then must we do? We must clearly set forth these distortions and deny them. The St. Andrew's Draft does not do this, and for that reason, I would think that a great many revisionists will endorse the Draft. Unless revisionist teaching and practice is defined and denied, publicly in some forum, I suspect there will be many throughout the Anglican Communion who will read the St. Andrew's Draft, think it all good and proper, and then be swept into accepting the false teaching of the revisionists.

In my last essay(4) I showed that the St. Andrew's Draft presented the inner-triune relations of the Persons of the Trinity as mutual, and further, that the unity of the Trinity is a product of the inner-triune relations of love. This is not an orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as set forth in the creeds. In Article 1.1.2 of the Draft, the authors affirm the creeds which define orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, but they did not apply that doctrine to the theology of the Draft itself.

In that same previous essay, I also showed that a similar distorted Trinitarian perspective informed The Virginia Report and "To Set Our Hope on Christ." To address this teaching, we must not only affirm normative sources such as the Thirty-nine Articles or the creeds, the revisionists affirm them, but also the specific errors of revisionist teaching must be exposed and denied. Consider two hypothetical articles, affirming the doctrine of the Trinity and denying specific revisionist distortions.

Article One: The doctrine of the Trinity is rightly defined by the three Ecumenical Creeds and the dogmatic definitions of the first seven general councils. There is no antecedent interpretation of the creeds other than the creeds themselves as understood in their original meanings.

Article Two: The fundamental, internal relations of the Trinity, the eternal begetting of the Son from the Father, and the procession of the Spirit from both, are not mutual. All other relations of the triune persons, such as the love among the divine Persons, are predicates of the prior, unequal, triune relations. Mutual love is not a primary human norm.

As I shall show in my next essay on Scripture, one of the principle ways revisionists reinterpret the sources of the Christian faith is by seeing them as time-bound expressions of Christian truth. In practice, the revisionists pay little attention to the creeds. If, however, they treat them as they do other sources of Christian truth, they would consider them to be significant in their original historical context, but superseded by subsequent perspectives and insights. As a result, they interpret the creeds from a perspective other than the creeds themselves. In this way the creeds are marginalized, seen in the fact that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity does not really inform the theology of the St. Andrew's Draft. Article One denies this possibility by insisting that the creeds cannot be interpreted in ways that go beyond their original meaning.

In light of my prior essay on the St. Andrew's Draft, Article Two goes to the heart of the matter. It denies the Trinitarian heresy promoted by the St. Andrew's Draft and by other documents such as the Virginia Report and "To Set Our Hope on Christ." This heresy is quite widespread among the revisionists.(5)

The revisionists are not sitting on their hands. They are working to train theologians and leaders throughout the Anglican world. Their aim, at least initially, is to make their perspective an acceptable theological perspective. Their teaching appears, and will continue to appear, as enlightened Christian truth to a great many people, even those who see themselves as orthodox. This is true because the revisionists accept the fundamental documents of Anglicanism. The St. Andrew's Draft shows this quite clearly. It enshrines Anglican doctrine, but it does not deny revisionist teaching.

The present crisis is as severe as the crisis that rocked the Christian world in the sixteenth century, leading to a reformed Anglicanism and the adoption of the Thirty-nine Articles. We can do no less. We must not only affirm classical Anglican teaching, but also, lest anyone be led astray, set forth and deny the corruptions of faith and morals that now afflict the Anglican Communion. I recommend that the orthodox gather in some forum such as GAFCON and expose the false teaching of the revisionists.

Finally, the St. Andrew's Draft is an important step forward in a process in which the revisionists will involve the orthodox in interminable theological conversation and eucharistic fellowship, all the while promoting practices never before affirmed by the church. Lambeth is the next step in that process. If the orthodox attend, they will find themselves party to a seduction. Only if the true nature of revisionist teaching is brought into the light and publicly denied will the orthodox be fully effective in countering this insidious process.

In my next essay I shall address the matter of Scripture in light of the St. Andrew's Draft. I shall show how the Draft allows the revisionists to affirm Scripture yet interpret it from an unorthodox perspective.

Endnotes

1. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Second Impression, (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, Inc.) 1952, p. 216.
2. Griffith W.H. Thomas, Principles of Theology (London: Church Book Room Press, 1951), pp. xli-ii.
3. http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8084.
4. http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7891.
5. For another similar trinitarian distortion, see the chapter by Wondra in Frederick Houk Borsch (ed.), The Bible's Authority in Today's Church, Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993.

---The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D. is VirtueOnline's resident cyber theologian wwww.rsanders.org