Sola Cultura?

I love Os Guinness!

From Virtue Online:

CHRISTIAN APOLOGIST AND AUTHOR BLASTS EPISCOPAL CHURCH

By David W. Virtue
Http:///www.virtueonline.org

NEW YORK, NY (Sept. 8 2005)--Christian apologist and author Dr. Os Guinness blasted the Episcopal Church telling several hundred persons at a Kairos Awards dinner that among mainline denominations it was the worst and most extreme capitulation to the spirit of the age in its abject surrender to the sexual mores of the modern world.

Calling them “kissing Judases” (from Soren Kierkegaard) -- followers of Jesus betray him with an interpretation. Guinness ripped the ECUSA saying, "we have seen a troubling growth of those who bend every nerve to reach successive generations of the cultured despisers of the Gospel: and then join them and become like them and no longer faithful to Jesus Christ. Some have surrendered to Enlightenment ideas, and become skeptics about God’s sovereignty, or skeptics about human sin, or skeptics about the possibility of the supernatural and any world beyond the here and now."

Guinness, an Episcopalian who attends The Falls Church in Northern Virginia, said that at one level, the result was an Alice in Wonderland church in which Christian leaders now openly deny what all Christians have believed and many have died to defend; Christian leaders who celebrate what their faith once castigated; Christian leaders who advance views closer to their foes than to their founder; and Christian leaders who deny the faith, but stay on shamelessly as leaders of the faith they deny.

"At a deeper level, these treacherous leaders are a shame and a disgrace to their Master and their fellow-believers, and like Judas are pursuing a suicidal path by surrendering to the spirit of the age leading to triviality and transience." Guinness cited Dean Inge who said, “He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.”

"Surrender to the spirit of the age leads to infidelity – what the Scriptures speak of as apostasy-as-adultery, cheating on God as a husband or wife cheats on his or her spouse. Surrender to the spirit of the age undermines the authority of faith, so that “Sola Scriptura” is replaced by “Sola Cultura” and the church has no fulcrum outside the world from which to speak and act in the world."

Guinness said that surrender to the spirit of the age severs the continuity of faith, cutting off its advocates from the faith of their fathers and mothers and making them captives to their culture and children of their times. "Surrender to the spirit of the age destroys the credibility of faith. There is little distinctively Christian to believe, and the intellectual of today can say as Oscar Wilde said to a trendy clergyman of his day, 'I not only follow you, I precede you.'"

Pointing the finger directly at the Episcopal Church, Guinness said that surrender to the spirit of the age obliterated the very identity of faith. In the words of an English philosopher and atheist, "At that point the creed becomes a way of saying what the infidel next door believes too.”

"In the sorry ranks of the revisionists, the loss of anything identifiably Christian is now almost complete."

Guinness also blasted the broader Christian community, saying that many had surrendered to political ideologies, and become the conservative or liberal party at prayer, or the Marxist party at the barricades.

"Some, including a growing number of recent evangelicals, are surrendering to modern insights, techniques, and fashions -- as if we could become more “relevant” by doing the Lord’s work in the world’s latest way."

Guinness praised four Anglican Archbishops from the Global South: the Most Reverend Henry Luke Orombi, (Uganda); The Most Reverend Datuk Yong Ping Chung, (SE Asia); The Most Rev. Gregory Venables (Southern Cone) and the Most. Rev. Peter Akinola (Nigeria) "who in their own countries and cultures have dared to stand up in the present controversies of the church, who have spoken out faithfully and clearly, and who have become leaders and beacons of faithfulness to their own people and far beyond -- towering examples of men made great by humbly submitting themselves to God and to his Word."

The Kairos Journal awards are given annually by businessman Emmanuel A. Kampouris in recognition for a bold and consistent stand for historic orthodoxy. The Kairos Journal Awards is given to individuals who demonstrate exemplary fidelity to the authority of Scripture and exceptional pastoral courage in their efforts to restore the prophetic voice of the Church.


---Katie