By Robin G. Jordan
While I never acquired my grandparents and mother’s knack for gardening, I love vegetable and flower gardens. I worked in our vegetable garden, learned the basics of making compost, and planted strawberry plants in our strawberry patch. But I never developed the passion for gardening that they evidenced.
My grandfather grew carnations and roses; my grandmother, geraniums; and my mother tulips and flowering cacti. While they passed onto me their love of flowers, they did not pass onto me their passion for growing them.
I was content to photograph wildflowers. These days I am content to gaze at them for several minutes at a time, drinking in their beauty whether they are black-eyed Susans, tiny bluets, dandelions, daffodils, field violets, goldenrod, hedge roses, roadside lilies, or yarrow. One of the reasons that I moved to western Kentucky was that I fell in love with the Cherokee roses.
One thing that I did learn is that whether they are wild or garden-variety, some of the plants with the most beautiful flowers are also the most dangerous. You do not try to pull giant hogweed up with your bare hands or absent-mindedly pluck an oleander leaf and chew on it.
The harmful beliefs and practices that one finds in the Anglican Church are often like these plants. They are very attractive and very dangerous at the same time. Because they are attractive, we are prone to let them grow and flourish. We naively assumed that since they are so attractive they must be harmless.
We also may know that they are harmful and that makes them even more attractive. We are poking our finger in the eye of the old fogies who think that they know everything. We will show them a thing or two!
Whatever our attitude we are doing ourselves and our fellow Anglicans great harm when we permit these beliefs and practices to spread through negligence or design.
We also live in a culture that tolerates all kinds of aberrant thinking and behavior and discourages interference in what it views as a form of self-expression. Just as we are encouraged to keep our religious views to ourselves outside the church, we are also encouraged to do so inside the church.
Wherever we find people who are bound by these self-imposed restrictions, we are also going to find people who do not feel bound by such restrictions and who will take advantage of the reluctance of those who do. We are seeing that happen in the Anglican Church in North America.
How many of my readers feel discomfort when I describe the beliefs and practices of others as pernicious? They themselves may not subscribe to such beliefs and practices but they may think to themselves, “Couldn’t he be a shade less dogmatic?” “Couldn’t he be a shade more tolerant?”
The truth is that we cannot escape the values of our relativistic, post-modern, post-Christian culture. They influence our thinking whether we like it or not. We have come to believe that everybody’s opinion has worth and should be respected and no one opinion is any more right than another.
But this sort of thinking does not serve us well when the identity of our ecclesiastical tradition and more importantly the message of the gospel are at stake. In some areas a variety of disparate opinions is permissible, even desirable, but not in these two areas.
Anglican identity and the gospel’s message are tied together. If we change one, we change the other.
Among the purposes of the Thirty-Nine Articles is to act as the Anglican Church’s “theological identity card” and “to safeguard the truth of the gospel, for the good of souls, the welfare of the church itself, and the glory of God” (see J. I Packer’s The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today, p. 67).
When we allow harmful beliefs and practices to grow and flourish in an Anglican province, beliefs and practices that eat away at the doctrinal foundation of the Anglican Church—the Holy Scriptures and the historic Anglican formularies, we are jeopardizing not only our identity but also the gospel’s message.
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