Liberalism and the Anglican Church - in Memory of J. I. Packer

This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Reverend Canon Dr. James Innell Packer who passed away on Friday at the age of 93. Dr. Packer was born and raised in England and ordained in the Church of England, but spent the latter half of his career here in Canada where he was Professor of Theology at Regent College in British Canada. I read his Fundamentalism And the Word of God and Knowing God when I was a high school student in the early 1990s. The former, which uses the word "fundamentalism" in the UK rather than the North American sense of the term, i.e., anyone who after 1850 still believed what the entire Church had believed about the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible for the previous eighteen centuries, is an excellent brief defence of Scriptural authority. The latter, which is likely the book that will be his lasting legacy, belongs to that genre that occupies the middle territory between works of serious theology and devotional material, combining elements of both. As a theologian, he will be remembered primarily as a champion of the aforementioned "fundamentalist" view of Scriptural authority with which I with only a single caveat (1) agreed with him wholeheartedly, and as a Calvinist who admired the Puritans, as I, who see in these historical figures the regicides who provided the model for the Jacobins of the French Revolution who in turn were the template for the Bolsheviks and all subsequent Communist movements and revolutions, most decidedly, do not. In Canada, he was a key figure in the Anglican Essentials movement, which began in the mid-1990s as a long-overdue response to creeping liberalism - theological liberalism, which starts from rejection of Scriptural authority and proceeds to reject or reinterpret the doctrines of Creedal orthodoxy - within the Anglican Church of Canada. The catalyst for the movement was the aggressive efforts of liberals to radically alter the Church's moral theology with regards to homosexuality in the direction of affirmation and later the blessing of same-sex partnerships and eventually the consecration of same-sex "marriages". Dr. Packer was situated in the Diocese of New Westminster, in which Michael Ingham was consecrated bishop in the same year Essentials was launched. At the time Ingham was noted for being very liberal in his theology - and everything else - and in 2002 he was the first bishop to authorize same-sex blessings, a decision which he followed up on with aggressive efforts to curb dissent. This eventually led the Essentials parish of St. John's Shaugnessy in Vancouver, the largest parish in the diocese and indeed the entire Anglican Church of Canada at the time, of which Dr. Packer was a member, to disassociate with the diocese and the national Church, and to join the Anglican Network in Canada under the episcopal oversight of the conservative Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

With regards to the same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage issue, I addressed it at length eight years ago in the "blessing" period of liberal activism immediately prior to their assault on the marriage canon in the last two General Synods. Since the same arguments apply to the other stages I will not repeat them here. I will note instead what is probably the most common charge levelled against those who oppose these changes by those determined to bring them about, which is that of a singular obsession with sex. While the answer to this charge, in the sense in which it was intended, is that the obsession is entirely on the part of those who wish to effect a revolution in moral theology and not on the part of those placed in a necessarily defensive position by their attacks on what is both the plain interpretation of the Scriptures and the Catholic, in the Vincentian meaning of the term, consensus as to their interpretation, it does, taken in a completely different sense, make a valid point that is related to what I said above about the Essentials response being long overdue. As I can attest, having grown up reading my paternal grandmother's issues of the Anglican Journal, the letters to the editor section, much larger then than it is today, were packed with this controversy in the decade prior to Essentials. My point, however, is not merely that an organized, conservative, response to liberal activism on this one issue should have begun at least a decade earlier, but that the ground the Essentials movement stood upon had been made considerably weaker because many for whom same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage went too far had already imbibed and accepted many other elements of liberalism.

Theological liberals in the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States, like to maintain that they are the present day heirs of the spirit within the Anglican tradition which has allowed the Orthodox and Evangelical (2) to co-exist in the same Church, more or less peacefully, for centuries. This is obviously not true for two reasons. The first and least important is that the attitude they have displayed towards conservative Anglicans in the controversies of the last century can hardly be described as one of peaceful co-existence. The second and most important is that the changes in doctrine and practice that they have championed, are ones that break with both the plain interpretation of the authoritative Scriptures stressed by Evangelicals and the Vincentian Catholicism of the Orthodox. In other words, they go against what the Bible clearly teaches and what the Church has taught and believed, "everywhere, always, and by all" from the first century onward. This is true not only of the same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage issue, but of the admission of women into the priesthood which took place in both the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in 1976, the more permissive attitude towards divorce and remarriage which started around the same time, and even the acceptance of artificial contraception at the Lambeth Conference of 1930.(3)

I am not saying , of course, that the Essentials leaders accepted all of these other changes. The late Dr. Packer, notably opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood. (4) There was no such consensus among them, however, in favour of the Scriptural/Vincentian Catholic positions on these issues as there was on same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage and this very much weakened the ground they stood upon with regards to the latter.

Now, you have probably noticed that all of these other issues pertain in one way or another to sex. At this point, we need to consider how this theological liberalism relates to the broader cultural/social/political liberalism. It was just last week that I made the observation that liberalism's loosening of social controls in the area of sex went hand-in-glove with a tightening of controls in almost every other area and how Aldous Huxley in Brave New World provided us with an illustration of what this, taken to the nth degree, would look like. Theological liberalism within the Church is a product of the liberalism in the broader culture and largely reflects it. This was true in the era of classical liberalism, which produced Latitudinarianism in the Church, and it is true in this era of hard left, progressive liberalism. If the Essentials leaders were divided among themselves on all of those other issues pertaining to sex in which the teachings of Scripture and the Catholic tradition were united on the one side and liberalism stood on the other, how many of them were willing to openly oppose hard left progressive liberalism wholesale?

How many, when the Anglican Church of Canada's House of Bishops came out with that disgusting letter last month about "systemic racism", were willing to stand up and say that "systemic racism" is itself a racist concept devised by New Left Critical Race Theorists (5) to demonize white people?

How many of those who opposed the attempt to change the marriage canon in the General Synod last year were willing to condemn the "apology" from former primate Fred Hiltz, approved at the same Synod, for the "spiritual harm" of evangelizing the Indians, which statement amounts to a denial that Jesus Christ is as He Himself declared "the Way, the Truth, and the Life"?

How many of them would have a bigger problem with the Archbishop's denial of the Gospel's exclusivity than with my non-pejorative use of the word "Indians" in the previous sentence?

How many of them, when the House of Bishops issued its call earlier this year, for a universal basic income, were willing to point out that the only concept difference between UBI and the social security net that was already in place prior to the pandemic is the elimination of even a nominal attempt at minimizing moral hazard and that if their idea is to make CERB permanent, as the Dominion government's "fiscal snapshot" of the week before last clearly demonstrates this will simply accelerate the country's rapid descent into insolvency, which will make things much worse rather than better for all the poor and underprivileged?

How many of them, when the bishops shut down the dioceses for the last four months in obedience to unnecessary and totalitarian public health orders, were willing to stand up and say that to obey these orders is to render unto Caesar that which belongs to God, that the Church is more essential than any business or all of them put together - especially so, in a time of crisis - and that the transitioning of all interaction into the virtual world of the internet is a trend the Church has a duty to oppose rather than jumping on board the bandwagon itself?

To oppose hard core left-liberalism only on sexual issues - or, for some, only on the single sexual issue of same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage - while remaining silent or supporting them on all these other matters, is to take an unsustainable position. Or, to use a Scriptural metaphor, to build one's house on sinking sand.


(1) Packer held to B. B. Warfield's view of Scriptural authority, which held the Scriptures to be "inerrant", but limited this quality to the non-extant autographs. I am inclined to agree with the late Theodore P. Letis, that this departure from the consensus of the post-Tridentine Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican scholastic tradition that the Scriptures were "infallible" and that this quality applied to the text as canonized by ecclesiastical use down to the present, was a shift to a weaker rather than a stronger view of Scriptural authority.

(2) Orthodox or "High Church" Anglicans stress the importance of continuity with the early, undivided, Church in organic and organizational structure and identity (the three clerical orders led by the historical episcopacy in Apostolic Succession), doctrine (the three ecumenical Creeds), ministry (Word and Sacrament) and worship (ceremony, ritual, and liturgy). Evangelical or "Low Church" Anglicans stress the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation (the five Solas), the supreme authority of the Scriptures in matters of doctrine and practice, and the need for a personal faith in Jesus Christ.

(3) That the break from the universal consensus of the Church against contraception also violates the plain teaching of the Scriptures is most likely to be seen as the weakest link in this chain as the most obvious Scriptural example, that of Onan, is descriptive historical narrative rather than explicitly prescriptive, but see the late Lutheran Bible scholar Charles D. Provan's The Bible and Birth Control (Zimmer Printing, 1989). for a full treatment of this subject.

(4) J. I. Packer, "Let's Stop Making Women Presbyters", Christianity Today, February 11, 1991.

(5) "Systemic racism" "structural racism" or "institutional racism" are all expressions that mean that every institution in Western Civilization, from the rule of law to 2X2=4, are unfairly biased towards white people and against all others and so all white people and only white people are collectively guilty of an unconscious racism. On May 6th, the Anglican Compass published an essay by the Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, who is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, entitled Discerning Friends from Enemies: Critical Race Theory, Anglicans in North America, And the Real Crisis. He attempted to argue that systemic racism predates Marxist Critical Theory, having been part of black theology, orthodox as well as progressive. From the examples he gives he seems to mean something different by "systemic racism" - overt racism on the part of institutions rather than individuals. The Black Lives Matter movement uses the expression in the Marxist sense, and relies upon many people misunderstanding it in the latter sense to weaken opposition to their Cultural Maoist agenda.