Ruritania, authority and the Jerusalem Declaration
By Martin Davie, Reflections of an Anglican Theologian.
[…] The basic theological principles underlying paragraph 13 of the Jerusalem Declaration are thus part of the historic Christian consensus and for the reasons given above they are principles which all Christians should be able to accept.
Have churches and leaders rejected the orthodox faith?
Someone might still argue, however, that although they accept the basic principles underlying paragraph 13 they cannot accept the claim being made in it that there are churches and leaders today who have departed from the orthodox faith in word and deed and whose actions therefore lack authority and should be rejected. However, this claim is justified because there is no question that over the past two decades there have been churches and leaders within the Anglican Communion who have departed from the orthodox faith. They have done this by supporting same-sex sexual relationships and same sex marriages in word and deed and increasingly by also supporting the idea that it is right for people to claim a sexual identity that is at variance with their God given biological sex.
When they have done these things they have gone against the truth revealed to us in nature and Scripture that God has created human beings as male and female, with their sex determined by their biology, and that He has created them to have sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex solely within the bounds of a permanent and exclusive marital relationship between one man and one woman (see Genesis 1-2 and Matthew 19:3-12, Mark 10:2-12).
It follows that they have acted without proper authority and that therefore, as paragraph 13 says, their claim to have authority to act in this way should be rejected by faithful Christians who should instead pray for them and call on them to repent and return to obedience to God.
What all this means is that there is no good reason for anyone to be unable to sign up to paragraph 13 of the Jerusalem Declaration and to therefore be unable to attend GAFCON.
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