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“In Him All Things Hold Together”: A Theological Meditation for Aspiring Christian Universities

The call to realize our identity as a Christian university is a great challenge, but it is also liberating, because it means that we don’t need to compete with the publicly-funded, provincial universities. This is good news, because we simply do not have the economic, infrastructural, and even personal resources to do the public research university thing better than they do it. But ... in the person of Christ and in the powerful presence of the Spirit who leads God’s people into all truth, we do have the potential to become something that public, secular universities cannot be:  a university in the true sense of the word, united in the uni veritas, the one or whole truth that holds together in the living Christ.

General Synod and A Word to the Church

It could be argued that if we had all gone home after voting on these affirmations, much of the pain that resulted from General Synod’s other decisions could have been avoided and we may have been the better for it. But as it happened, we proceeded to the debate and vote on the marriage canon amendment, the failure of which unleashed an avalanche of protest, accusation, and ill will that in many ways will form the lasting characterization of General Synod 2019 for many of those who were present.

Why Can’t Lambeth Become a Synod?

Why can’t Lambeth become a synod? Whatever our answers to this question, we must recognize that the historical case against synodality for Lambeth rests upon a rather unattractive nationalism, and is simply untenable.

Technopolis

We citizens of Technopolis believe fervently in the supremacy of the will. What we will is how things are. Nothing is chiseled into sacred tablets, nothing has any meaning that we can’t change, nothing is beyond our self-interested exploitation and tinkering. If by an act of collective will we deem something good, then it must be good simply because we’ve deemed it so.

ARCIC III, Walking Together on the Way: Learning to Be the Church—Local, Regional, Universal

ARCIC III is convinced that, just as a return to the sources of tradition in Scripture, liturgy, and the Patristic and Scholastic periods (ressourcement) has been renewing both Anglican and Roman Catholic theology since the middle of the last century, so critical self-examination through the prism of ecumenical dialogue and receptive learning can deepen the renewal and participation of the Church in the Trinitarian communion of God.

The ACNA BCP 2019: A Critical Appreciation

Perhaps the lesson of the ACNA BCP for us is this: thoughtful contemporary-language retrieval of classical Anglican liturgical texts and forms is very possible...However, when such retrieval sets up a uniform classical Anglicanism against errors or excesses of the liturgical movement, it can smooth out of differences in the classical Anglican tradition in a way that produces less-than-coherent liturgies.