I second Peter H's comments.

Reading the thread from outside the conversation it seems that minds have met very well. Everyone seems to have understood what is said. It is a disservice to the hard work that Robert has put in to this thread to suggest you can't understand him.

The real problem is that wills haven't met. It's not that you can't understand what Robert has written; it's that you don't like it.

Lord, give us minds and wills that are captive to what you have revealed to us in your word.

John Foxe.

Dear Clare,

thank you for your dialogue and apologies that this brief and hurried post can only skim one issue from your thoughtful response.

You are absolutely right that submitting to Christ involves our emotions. But where we fundamentally disagree is to put this in opposition to giving intellectual assent to certain propositions. It's both/and rather than either/or.

Regards,

JF.

Dear Clare,

I think the answer to your question as to how many Christians had scripture portions will depend on when and where we are considering in history. Between Wycliffe and Cranmer, owning a bible in English was a capital offence in England, and yet Lollard translations from the Vulgate circulated.

In the early church and the Roman/Byzantine context I see no difficulty envisaging a reasonable degree of literacy and the circulation of scripture portions. After all, we only have so many manuscripts because a vast number were produced!

Certainly there have been times in history when people have talked almost of nothing other than what the Bible teaches. I recall one anecdote that the barbers in Alexandria were talking of nothing else except the homousios, homoiousios debate!

The medieval church's reliance on images and the use of Latin was roundly condemned by the Reformers as preventing the people having access to the bible in words they could understand. People may have come to Christ without access to the Bible but it was as much despite the means used as it was because of them. Faith comes by hearing rather than seeing.

And yes, Jesus is the Word of God who sustains us and the Bible too, in a different sense, is the Word of God. Jesus is the 'who' who sustains us, and he does it principally by his Word written, by his Spirit.

Regards,

JF.

Who are the six English evangelical bishops at GAFCON? Broadbent, Benn and Nazir-Ali I know about. Who are the others?

Intriguedly yours,

The Foxe.

Dear John,

a good question indeed. But then how else would non-conformity arise if it were not for the insistence to conform? There is a big difference between unity and uniformity, and Anglicanism, sadly, has at times groped for the latter foolishly thinking that by so doing it is gaining the former.

Regards,

John Foxe.

Dear L Roberts,

may I suggest that if you fail to see that the church has authority in what it teaches, even though that authority is under the supremacy of scripture, then you are not being Protestant enough. Anabaptist, perhaps, but not Protestant.

Regards,

The Foxe

Dear Clare,

sadly you go wrong at the very beginning. Luther did not cast around for some substitute authority and come up with the Bible de novo. He went back to the authority that the church had submitted to in the very beginning: the sacred scriptures.

Just as the Roman Catholic church gravely erred by putting tradition and ecclesiastical pronouncements on a par with scripture, so too modern Anglicanism will deservedly sink if it makes sticking together an ultimate value which trumps biblical truth. 

Even if neither you nor I represent Fulcrum, I hope there are boundaries of biblical truth which Fulcrum's members regard both as non-negotiable and thus as breaking fellowship.

Regards,

The Foxe.

Luther's posting his theses on the door of Wittenberg church was a recognised method of raising issues in the church.

The biggest difference between Luther and Cowell is that Luther wanted to roll the clock back to the teachings of the early church. Cowell wants to roll it forward to modern day society. (Unless Cowell seriously believes Jesus and Paul wanted to marry gay couples.)

In Christ,

JF.

Dear James and Sarah,

thank you for your replies. I wasn't denying that Baxter disagreed with episcopacy. He most cetainly did! I was denying that he voluntarily separated from the Church of England. He did not. He was ejected. He has received a limited licence to preach in London and preached his farewell sermon there a little in advance of Black Bartholomew's day. He chose not to preach up to the deadline so that none would think he was wavering in his opposition to the Act of Uniformity.

Unfortunately the relevant sentence is obscured in Google's online edition of Calamy's work on the Ejection about Baxter's departure from Kidderminster. It seems Baxter was inhibited from Kidderminster after refusing a bishopric but he was still able to preach in London after this date.

In Christ,

John Foxe.

Dear Sarah,

I think you'll find Richard Baxter was ordained by John Thornborough, Bishop of Worcester so episcopal ordination wasn't the issue for him.

In any case, Baxter did not 'leave' the Church of England. He was ejected along with 2000 others for preferring to follow Christ rather than the king.

Further, even colleges that recommend nothing else by the Puritans tend to have The Reformed Pastor on their reading list. I'm sure Wycliffe has suggested it to ordinands for many years since it is a classic of pastoral care.

Ejectingly yours,

John Foxe.

Dear TJ,

it's not so much the dual authorship of scripture as that the human aspects of authorship detract from its God-givenness so that it becomes errant.

Don Carson reviews Enns' book here.  More up to date comments are on the blog at that site.

I wouldn't see this as an 'only in America' thing. Many in the British Reformed world would look to Westminster as exemplary of their views. That said, I've not seen anything in thing in British periodicals about this particular dispute.

I wouldn't think of Westminster as particularly conservative amongst Reformed seminaries. There's far more conservative places in the US! Nonetheless I also recognise many Americans can be thought of as highly conservative from British standards. Westminster, like most Americans i know, is in the north east corridor, which is the part of the US most similar to here.

Yours in Christ,

JF.

Dear Stottyfan,

it seems rather unnecessary to tar Westminster Theological Seminary with the loaded term 'right wing'. I don't think there is any way I, or you, could conclude what the political bias, if any, is of their faculty. We could certainly call them Reformed, or Confessional, or both, but 'right wing' would be a misnomer for either of these terms.

In Christ,

JF.