Rob Sturdy, up at Trinity Myrtle Beach, just wrote the second installment addressing the above question – and addressing it from a particularly Anglican point of view. I hope you’ll click through and read both articles. They’re very good.
A good friend in Charleston recently asked the question “What does it mean to be Reformed?” Being “reformed” is currently in vogue. That is, it’s cool to be a Calvinist. This growing trend which has been documented by the New York Times, Time Magazine, and U.S.A. Today has produced new interest in Reformed Christianity but it has also produced much confusion about what it means to be Reformed. So it’s currently a hot topic worth addressing.
Second, to speak of “Reformed” Christians is to speak of the heritage of the Anglican Church, which both me and my friend who asked the question are part of. Unfortunately, just as people from Idaho will pretend they’re from somewhere else when they move to a big city so have many Anglicans forgotten where they’ve come from. The Anglican Church was born in the fires (literal) of the Protestant Reformation, of which the Church of England adopted a fairly strict Reformed (yes Calvinist!) approach to theology in its first 100 years. Just as visiting with your quirky friend’s parents is always an “aha” moment, so too knowing where this church has come from should prove a revealing experience.
Related Articles
2 users responded in this post
Steve,
Thanks for posting the links to these articles. We have reached a point in the history of the Anglican Church with Anglicanorum coetibus and the creation of the Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans in the Roman Catholic Church and more recently the Dublin Primates’ Meeting when Anglicans need to be giving serious thought to who they are and rediscovering or in some cases discovering for the first time the Protestant and Reformed heritage of the Anglican Church. Are they going to be satisfied with subscribing to what comes close to an independent liberal form of Roman Catholicism (minus the papacy) that, when it is not giving more weight to church tradition than to Scripture, ignores both Scripture and church tradition, and serves as a “forcing bed” for converts to Roman Catholicism, pre-evangelizing and pre-catechizing Anglicans in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice? Or are they going to reclaims the Protestant and Reformed heritage of the Anglican Church, of the historic Anglican formularies, and once more become a church that is Protestant and Reformed in character?
^^^what he said.