Calling ECUSA's liberal hierarchy "kissing Judases"(taken from Soren Kierkegaard) --followers of Jesus who betray him and his teachings--Guinness ripped ECUSA, citing "a troubling growth [therein] of those who bend every nerve to reach successive generations of the cultured despisers of the Gospel: and then join them and become like them and no longer faithful to Jesus Christ. Some have surrendered to Enlightenment ideas, and become skeptics about God's sovereignty, or skeptics about human sin, or skeptics about the possibility of the supernatural and any world beyond the here and now."

Guinness, an Episcopalian who attends the Falls Church in the Virginia city of the same name, said that, at one level, the result is an Alice in Wonderland church in which "Christian" leaders now openly deny what all Christians have believed and many have died to defend. There are denominational leaders who now celebrate what their faith once castigated; who advance views closer to their foes than to their founder; who deny the faith, but stay on shamelessly as leaders of the faith they deny, Guinness said.

"[These]treacherous leaders are a shame and a disgrace to their Master and their fellow-believers, and like Judas are pursuing a suicidal path by surrendering to the spirit of the age, leading to triviality and transience," he declared. He cited Dean Inge who said, "He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower."

"Surrender to the spirit of the age," Guinness averred, "leads to infidelity - what the Scriptures speak of as apostasy-as-adultery, cheating on God as a husband or wife cheats on his or her spouse." It also "undermines the authority of faith, so that Sola Scriptura is replaced by Sola Cultura, and the church has no fulcrum outside the world from which to speak and act in the world."

Such surrender further severs the continuity of faith, cutting off its advocates from the faith of their fathers and mothers and making them captives to their culture and children of their times, Guinness contended. It also "destroys the credibility of faith. There is little distinctively Christian to believe, and the intellectual of today can say as Oscar Wilde said to a trendy clergyman of his day, 'I not only follow you, I precede you.'"

Pointing the finger directly at ECUSA, Guinness said that surrender to the spirit of the age obliterates the very identity of faith. In the words of an English philosopher and atheist, "At that point the creed becomes a way of saying what the infidel next door believes, too."

"In the sorry ranks of the revisionists, the loss of anything identifiably Christian is now almost complete," Guinness asserted.

HE ALSO BLASTED the broader Christian community, saying that many have surrendered to political ideologies, and become the conservative or liberal party at prayer, or the Marxist party at the barricades.

"Some, including a growing number of recent Evangelicals, are surrendering to modern insights, techniques, and fashions -- as if we could become more 'relevant' by doing the Lord's work in the world's latest way."

Guinness praised the four Anglican primates from the Global South honored by Kairos Journal -- Archbishops Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda, Datuk Yong Ping Chung of Southeast Asia, Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, and Peter Akinola of Nigeria -- "who in their own countries and cultures have dared to stand up in the present controversies of the church, who have spoken out faithfully and clearly, and who have become leaders and beacons of faithfulness to their own people and far beyond -- towering examples of men made great by humbly submitting themselves to God and to his Word."

A Kairos Journal team singled out the four Anglican primates for their bold and consistent stand for historic orthodoxy "in light of theological decline in the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada," and in recognition of the fact that the crisis of Anglicanism affects all of Christendom.

These awards were the first that the Journal plans to give annually to individuals who "demonstrate exemplary fidelity to the authority of Scripture and exceptional pastoral courage in their efforts to restore the prophetic voice of the Church."

Kairos Journal is published by Emmanuel A. Kampouris, former CEO and Chairman of American Standard Companies, Inc.

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