Perspectives

Hold Fast to Sound Doctrine by Archbishop Steve Wood   Oct 22, 2024

The following post was written by Archbishop Steve Wood for The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) and can be found here.

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
1 Timothy 1:15

It is so very easy for the church to lose sight of the main thing.

Today, churches are all too often riven by arguments over politics, socio-economic issues, and what it means to be human. All of those are important questions and we are to be wise in how we address the questions that our society and culture ask of us. But we also need to be aware that those things are secondary. They are not the principal work of the Church. And we must be focused on the main thing.

What is the main thing? Jesus is the main thing. But what about Jesus? Well, we do not have to guess. Paul tells us quite plainly what the main thing is in our text today, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” (1 Timothy 1.15)

Those words may sound familiar to you. They should. They are the third of Thomas Cranmer’s four Comfortable Words that follow our Confession and Absolution. Cranmer had an amazing ability to focus our minds and our hearts on the gospel message.

This is the proclamation of the church, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” That is the main thing. That is the message to which I have given myself. That is the message I have sought to keep central in the parishes I have served. This message is central in our diocese and in our province

That message – that doctrinal assertion – was at risk in Timothy’s church in Ephesus, and Paul was concerned.

Paul will return to the matter of sound doctrine for the second time in as many chapters: 1 Timothy 2.5, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.”

Why? Why the concern? Why the insistence on sound doctrine? Because Paul understood that sound doctrine produces a sound church. Right living follows right thinking.

One American Christian theologian, writing of the radical transformation of Christian theology and Christian belief taking place in the Western church, penned these words, “the sovereignty of God [is being replaced] with the sovereignty of the self. In this therapeutic age, human problems are reduced to pathologies in need of a treatment plan. Sin is simply excluded from the picture, and doctrines as central as the wrath and justice of God are discarded as out of step with the times and unhelpful to the project of self-actualization.”

Friends, the world in which we live is a murky world of madness, a world that, at best, is confused about what is true and what is false. This confusion can work its way into our churches. And so, for every doctrine we profess to be true, there seem to be a hundred false contenders.

It has always been so.

But we are not left to ourselves. Our gracious God has given us His Word, His Spirit, and the examples of our forebears. In our text, Paul sets for us a model. He begins with doctrine. He begins with the transformation of the mind. But this was not just his message to a young Timothy. It was his counsel to the church at large.

But it’s not just the head that is the problem. It is the heart as well.

To the church in Ephesus, Timothy’s church, Paul wrote: “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” (Ephesians 4.17-18)

The human problem – our problem – my problem – is with both our heads and our hearts. As a young clergyman, Bishop FitzSimons Allison, echoing St. Paul’s description of the interplay of heart and mind, said to me, “What the heart desires, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”

Yes, Paul tells us that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. But he goes deeper. One commentator said, “[God] penetrates beneath the futile mind and the darkened understanding and the willful ignorance,” and says that it is all rooted in, “the hardness of their heart. And here is the deepest disease, infecting everything else: Our mental suppression of God’s truth is rooted in the hardness of our heart. Our hard hearts will simply not submit to the supremacy of Christ, and so our blind minds cannot see the supremacy of Christ.”

Paul begins by stating and restating the necessity of the church to embrace sound doctrine. Paul knew that sound doctrine reveals truth about God to both our minds and our hearts, leading us to love God more than we love our sin.

A fundamental premise behind Paul’s writing is this: the Christian faith has substance. The Christian faith is a crunchy faith. It has content. It matters what you believe.

It has always mattered what Christians believe.

Classically, those things that we believe about God – about Jesus, about the Father and the Spirit, those things we believe about the Christian faith are called “doctrines.” But like the word “sin,” the word doctrine is not often used in our culture, even our Christian culture. When it is used, it is rarely used positively.

But, like it or not, what we believe and the faith we profess will both determine our eternal destiny as well as the manner in which we live in this world.

So, what do you believe? What do you think about Jesus?

There are those – even within the church – who have no use for doctrine. They view doctrinal statements as being divisive. They claim that they create a hostile and intolerant religious environment.

But I’d argue the opposite. A doctrineless faith is a rootless faith. A lowest common denominator, contentless faith, is an anemic faith. And it is precisely this “believe anything you want kind of faith” that is rightly rejected by many outside the Christian faith as trivial and inadequate to make sense of the experiences and complexities of their life.

Hold fast to and proclaim sound doctrine.

Yours in Christ,

++Steve

The Most Revd Stephen D. Wood
Archbishop, The Anglican Church in North America

A Letter Concerning the Death of George Floyd and So Many Others

George Floyd was made in the image of God and as such is a person of utmost value. This is not true because a few Anglican Bishops issue a letter. This conviction arises from our reading of Scripture. The Psalmist said:

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well (Psalm 139:13-14).

The opening book of our Scriptures declares the value of all human life:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)

What happened to George is an affront to God because his status as an image-bearer was not respected. He was treated in a way that denied his basic humanity. Our lament is real. But our lament is not limited to George and his family. We mourn alongside the wider Black community for whom this tragedy awakens memories of their own traumas and the larger history of systemic oppression that still plagues this country.

George’s death is not merely the most recent evidence that proves racism exists against Black people in this country. But it is a vivid manifestation of the ongoing devaluation of black life. At the root of all racism is a heretical anthropology that devalues the Imago Dei in us all.  The gospel reveals that all are equally created, sinful, and equally in the need of the saving work of Christ. The racism we lament is not just interpersonal. It exists in the implicit and explicit customs and attitudes that do disproportionate harm to ethnic minorities in the country. In other words, too often racial bias has been combined with political power to create inequalities that still need to be eradicated.

As bishops in the ACNA, we commit ourselves to stand alongside those in the Black community as they contend for a just society, not as some attempt to transform America into the kingdom of God, but as a manifestation of neighborly love and bearing one another’s burdens and so fulfilling the law of Christ.  We confess that too often ethnic minorities have felt like contending for biblical justice has been a burden that they bear alone.

In the end, our hope is not in our efforts but in the shed blood of Jesus that reconciles God to humanity and humans to each other. Our hope is that our churches become places where the power of the gospel to bring together the nations of the earth (Rev 7:9) is seen in our life together as disciples. Such work cannot be carried out by an individual letter in a time of crisis. We commit to educating ourselves and the churches under our charge within a biblical and theological frame to face the problems of our day. We likewise commit to partnering with like-minded churches in the work of justice and reconciliation.

The Feast of Pentecost is here in a couple of days. The power of the Spirit is loosed to convict of sin and deliver us from its power. Our prayer is that in a country as diverse as these United States, the church will be united in the essential truths of Christianity including its concern for the most vulnerable. So…Come Holy Spirit. Mediate to us and all the earth, we pray, the victory of Jesus over the principalities and powers that seek to rule and cause death and destruction in this time between the times. Come Holy Spirit.

Almighty God, on this day, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, you revealed the way of eternal life to every race and nation: Pour out this gift anew, that by the preaching of the Gospel your salvation may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Almighty God, you created us in your own image: Grant us grace to contend fearlessly against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and help us to use our freedom rightly in the establishment of justice in our communities and among the nations, to the glory of your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Sincerely in Christ,

Bishops Jim Hobby, Todd Hunter, Stewart Ruch III, and Steve Wood

BACK TO THE ADVENT NEWSLETTER

A note from Bishop Steve Wood

In the title essay of her collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, the author, Marilynne Robinson recounts her days growing up accompanied by the inherent loneliness of Idaho and the enduring positive benefit of this kind of loneliness (she notes that for Americans of a certain era such emotions as mourning, melancholy, regret, and loneliness were “high sentiments, as they were for the psalmist and for Sophocles, for the Anglo-Saxon poets and for Shakespeare”). Being a child of the Midwest with family still scattered across her hills and hollows along with a son who with his family live in Montana, Robinson’s essay was resonant.

All of this was brought to mind with the advent of Advent and having recently returned from a week in South Dakota where I was struck again by the beautiful loneliness of the post-harvest landscape – with winter settling in – and the long wait ‘til spring.

These high sentiments of mourning and melancholy and loneliness are often my companions. I experience them in the solitude of life.  Sometimes in the poetry of a Herbert or Whitman or Donne, other times listening to the “wh-who’s” of the owls and howls of the coyotes while walking through the chilly black woods under a full November moon.

This week we, the church universal, mark the beginning of our church year with the season of Advent.  The season of Advent is a season of preparation as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ. Our seasonal collects and hymns have as their backdrop the prophetic witness to the people of Israel waiting in their “lonely exile” for their Messiah.  They mark as well our waiting in a lonely exile as a peculiar people for the Messiah’s second Advent. The church seasons are meant to help us navigate the landscape of our inner being. They can, at their best, give shape and rhythm to our spiritual life.  They can, at their best, provide the opportunity to recognize and embrace aspects of our life we might wish to ignore – all within the context of the faith and our community of faith.

The season of Advent is a season of preparation as we prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth.  We live as some have said, “in between the times.” Meaning that we live between the incarnation and the final consummation of His return  And in this waiting, I find a sense of the high sentiments of which Robinson wrote. I find myself saying often with the biblical writers, “Maranatha” – “come, Lord.” I find myself waiting and wondering with the Psalmist who asks, ‘how long?”  How long until our Lord’s triumphant Advent?

So, how can Advent help us navigate the inner landscape of our soul?

Well, we do know something of Christ as we await the final consummation. We are not left as orphans.  He has come. He has given us His Spirit. And so, our waiting is a patient waiting. Patient because we have confidence in Christ and His promise to return.  Patient because of His promise that He will set all things right. Patient because of His promise that there will be a day and a place where there will be no more tears, a day and a place where we will see Him face-to-face.  This confident, patient waiting can give us – if and as we cooperate with the Spirit’s work in our lives – the opportunity to examine and address those hindrances and obstacles in our lives: our crooked paths, our rough places. This waiting though is suffused with inherent loneliness and longing.  A loneliness and a longing that allows one to, in Robinson’s words, “experience . . . radical singularity, one’s greatest dignity and privilege.” That allows one to navigate the landscape of the heart and to discover again that our high sentiments and deepest desires are pointers that point to One thing – the One man, Christ Jesus – who alone is able to satiate our heart.

Come, Lord Jesus.

BACK TO THE ADVENT NEWSLETTER

A note from Bishop Wood…

Some of the clearest statements in Scripture concern giving. The first murder in the Bible was rooted in God’s acceptance of Abel’s offering and His rejection of Cain’s offering. Genesis 4 tells us that Abel brought both the first and the best to the Lord while Cain brought neither. The worshipper and his/her offerings are inseparable; a reflection of their heart and what they hold most dear. We see this again and again throughout the biblical record.

400 years before the Law was given Abraham, by faith, set the pattern of giving when he gave a 10th – a tithe – of all that he had to the priest, Melchizedek.

The Lord, through the prophet Malachi (3.6-12), said to the people of Israel – and to people of faith through the ages, “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.”

That’s an extraordinary statement – and an even more extraordinary promise – the Lord says, “test me in this and see if I am faithful.”

And the pattern is the same in the New Testament. Did you know that Jesus talked about money more than He did Heaven and Hell combined?

Jesus talked about money more than anything else except the Kingdom of God.

11 of 39 parables talk about money.
1 of every 7 verses in the Gospel of Luke talk about money.

In one of his more well-known parables in Luke (16) Jesus says this: “Therefore if you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust thetrue riches?”​

What’s he saying? Well, what is mammon? What are “true riches?”

Quite simply mammon is money, yes, but it’s more. It’s everything – it’s our wealth, it’s our investments, it’s our possessions. It’s what so many strive for, give themselves for, sacrifice their families for. And note this, elsewhere in this same parable Jesus calls all of this that we value so much “little,” insignificant, temporal, passing.

And then Jesus speaks of true riches. What are true riches? True riches are spiritual treasure given to us by the Holy Spirit – spiritual stewardship and responsibility in God’s kingdom.

So, what’s Jesus saying? He’s saying if you – if I’m not faithful with something as temporal and insignificant as earthy treasure and possessions with which I am entrusted to steward for His purposes during my lifetime, why would I ever expect the Holy Spirit to entrust to me real treasure, with spiritual treasure, with eternal treasure?

So if the Bible is so consistent and clear – so encouraging in its teaching on how we handle our money – why are we so hesitant?

Let me tell you what I see in my life and in the lives of folks I’ve spoken with over the years: fear. We’re afraid. We think to ourselves, “It’s unreasonable to live like this. It doesn’t make sense. If I live like this, if I give like this, will I have enough?” And behind these questions lies the deepest question revealing our deepest fear: “Is God faithful? Will God really come through?” And in this sense, mammon, money, possessions are a wonderful diagnostic test. How so? Well, Jesus again. In Matthew 6 (21), He says, “where your treasure is, there will be your what? There will your heart be also . . . Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Friends, where’s your treasure? There’s your heart.