Vindicated!

And of course, you believe the lie, because you have the Church Pension Fund to ease the pain and stretch out the agony till at last you keel over like an aging brontosaurus.

The Western church has been on death watch for nearly forty years, longer if you probe deeply enough, but its final days are upon us.

The Church of Cranmer is dying, it will not be resuscitated, it cannot, because it adopted a lie, and the lie has been perpetuated, twisted, distorted, manipulated, cajoled, and brokered in to the point that the poison of lies is now racing through the church’s ecclesiastical veins at breakneck speed.

It is only a matter of time, and Father Time will take care of it. The judgement of God will prevail. He has allowed the western branch of Anglicanism to pursue heretical teachings and, in the course of events, allowed it to rot and die. Like the parable of the vine, it has been cut off and cast into the fire to be destroyed.

If you think it is just about bad morals you would be wrong, the disease runs much deeper. The prevailing issues of sodomy, homosexual marriage, drag queens and LGBTQI acceptance is just the tip of the iceberg. Sexual sin is no longer sin, it is an alternative lifestyle. Straight or gay it matters little any more. The abandonment of Scripture as authoritative is the prevailing sin.

The spiritual life was thrown out, replaced by the social gospel. Bettering this world became the rallying cry as the here and now overshadowed otherworldliness. Pensions and 401ks for all overcame eternity. The cancer of compromise gave the church spiritual arterial sclerosis, the cholesterol fat of theological timidity.

The loss of confidence in God as both savior and Lord prevailed. The church no longer had confidence in its own beliefs. Now the talk is of inclusion, diversity, discrimination, homophobia, and other trite lefty words that go along with cultural Marxism. The Holy Spirit departed from the church never to be heard from again.

It is as though God had written Ichabod over the whole mess, and said “I’m done.” God himself had finally moved on.

It was the perfect segue for a Frank Griswold and a Justin Welby. Griswold’s fey, faux Catholicism matched Welby’s managerial style aided by woke issues that occupied his time. Michael Curry’s love talk was as vacuous as tik tok videos.

Jesus got lost and in time disappeared. The Church of England became a branch of the Labor Party just as the Episcopal Church worshipped the Democratic Party. Find as many issues as you can, fund them to death and hope that you are doing God’s will even as the pews emptied and the pulpits reflected Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School more than Jesus Christ and the Church.

But the jig is up. The game is almost over. Demographics do not lie. The old are dying and there are no new generations to fill pulpits and pews.

Archbishop Justin Welby as it turned out was weak, woke and spineless. Caught in a lie about his knowledge of a serial sexual, psychological, and physical abuser that he had known about for over four decades, he suddenly resigned after saying he would not.

On Sunday it was further revealed in the Daily Mail that York Archbishop Stephen Cottrell had ignored 11 cases of sexual abuse and should step down. We await the executioner.

The mess is deep and unfixable, resulting in parishioners fleeing the church in their droves forcing what church leaders euphemistically called “pastoral reorganization” to revamp the church, code for dying parishes.

Churches are being sold off to the highest bidder or remade into condos for the downtrodden, thus keeping alive Jesus’s concern for the poor, even though his message of salvation is no longer taught or made relevant, down-graded by progressive preachers and lost on the multitudes.

Jesus moves farther away as the faux glossolalia of mega preachers and vindictive, ambitious archbishops and cardinals become more obvious. CONCLAVE scratched the surface of Catholic ambition. An evangelical protestant version could easily be written starring Carl Lentz and a host of fake evangelical preachers pontificating on the life of Christ even as their lives and life styles demonstrate the exact opposite.

We are a nation of shallow thinkers aided by the culture of celebrity and the vacuity of talk show hosts. No wonder Anglican theologian Dr. J. I Packer opined that theologically, America was 3,000 miles and half an inch deep.

We are now in a spiritual fantasy world where spiritual AI has become the new reality. AI will now rewrite our faith to accommodate it to the spirit of the age.

The Church will survive of course. Jesus said it would, but it will be the church of the small not the big. It will be baked into community life, involving the ‘little people’ not the rich and powerful, or fake mega preachers or evangelical Washington politicians more concerned with the canons of capitalism than splinters of the blood-stained cross.

At 80, my own time is almost up. I shall not be sorry to go. I have grown weary of it all. Friends become fewer. Trump has destroyed relationships that will never be healed. America is devolving like the church. Democracy is being overtaken by authoritarianism even as the church is being swallowed up by the profane as the sacred dies.

Nones are the new vogue religion of America. America deserves its fate. It has earned it. The church won’t fully die; it will just be irrelevant as millions of nominal Christians walk away and America becomes a third world spiritual nation. Heirs of the gospel will now be found in Africa, South East Asia, Iran, and China.

The gates of hell will not prevail our Lord said, but it is going to get very hot before the gates slam shut.

If you want to read more of my scribblings they can be found here: www.virtueonline.org

END

VINDICATED!

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
November 20, 2024

It is hard not to gloat when you feel what you have been doing and writing for nearly 40 years finally comes to pass.

Of course, it is also tinged with a profound sadness watching the slow death of western Anglicanism happening before your eyes.

The Church has terminal cancer, but the doctors keep offering hope and new medications and formulas to keep the patient alive even though everyone knows that ‘Not to be Resuscitated’ is written on a bed board at the end of the mattress.