Commitment in Kigali

No.156: April 21, 2023

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Today The Square Inch Newsletter turns 3 years old. With two exceptions, that means 156 straight weeks delivering this missive to your inbox. I am grateful for this accomplishment, both to God for the ability and to you all for the opportunity (to have readers). I started this venture as a hoped-for remedy for a long term case of writer’s block. For a very long time a blank screen and blinking cursor paralyzed me. I’d type a sentence, decide it was terrible, hit the delete key and stare at the blinking cursor again. So I made a commitment to myself: every single Friday I would publish something. Anything. It could be whimsical or serious, short or long, but it would be a piece of writing that must be published on Friday.

Obviously, it has worked so far, to the extent that I eventually began publishing three times a week.

As I look back over the volume I’ve produced over the past three years, it amounts to more than a quarter million words—not too shabby for a guy paralyzed by a blinking cursor. And I am reasonably pleased with the variety and quality of the content, which seems to have been faithful to the original manifesto.

Thank you, my friends, for being on the other end of these weekly letters. It means a great deal to me.

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There is a lot of news vying for our attention these days, and a lot of it is ephemeral, fleeting, and a useless distraction. For example, a couple of weeks ago I encouraged you to remember something about the upcoming political season: the political left and its media partners, along with a lot of pretend conservatives (of the “NeverTrump” variety), despite all their wailing and howling about Donald Trump, actually want him to be the Republican nominee in 2024. And I said that this explains and will continue to explain their campaign against his probable challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

It is weird, I know. If you hate Trump so badly, why wouldn’t you try to help his challenger? Very simple: they think that DeSantis would win the Presidential election and Donald Trump would lose. They are trying to help Trump win the nomination. Again. They did this in 2016 and, in the perfect storm named “Hillary” it came back to bite them; but this time the gamble has far better odds. The high-water mark for Trump’s electoral support is way back in the rearview mirror. His base remains strong, as bizarre as that seems to me, but it isn’t a base that can win 270 Electoral College votes—and it never will be again.

Where was I? Yes, useless distractions. In just the last week, right on cue, there has been a flurry of breathless media reports and “analyses” of how Ron DeSantis is already flaming out (“Is he the new Scott Walker?)! He’s a bad retail politician! He’s too extreme! His polling numbers are woefully poor! I want this all to sound to you like Charlie Brown’s teacher: WaWaWaWaWaWaWaaaaah. It is an attempt to mislead you and to shape a narrative. Don’t let them.

Ron DeSantis hasn’t even announced his candidacy. Let’s wait and see how he chooses to introduce himself to the American people on a national level. People by and large are pretty much going to like him, so you can just ignore all these manipulative hand-wringers. And in my view DeSantis has done exactly the right thing in not getting into a brawl with Trump all this time. Trump has been sending out increasingly hysterical all-caps tirades trying to pre-define DeSantis (some of which are literally insane—DeSantis was a “lockdown” Governor!?), which gives the Governor an advantage. He knows what the attacks are going to be, and has plenty of time to craft a plan to address them. He will address them, and when he starts throwing some haymakers of his own things will start to get interesting. But not before then.

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I wanted to share with you some news that is not ephemeral, fleeting, and a useless distraction. The 2023 Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Kigali, Rwanda just wrapped up, and today they released their “Kigali Commitment.”

I am by no means an expert in the labyrinthine jurisdictional mechanisms of global Anglicanism (which is about 85 million members strong), but here’s my layperson’s attempt to explain it to you: GAFCON is a global movement comprised of over 85% of Anglicans worldwide. It was formed in 2008 in protest to the theological and doctrinal drift of the “mother” church (for lack of a better word), the Church of England, whose Archbishop of Canterbury has long been recognized as “first among equals” in the church hierarchy. GAFCON hosts a global conference once every five years and, again, it represents the vast majority of Anglicans in the world—most of whom are in the southern hemisphere (Africa, South America). That’s an important thing to know: the Church of England is a small minority of global Anglicans.

And they’ve just been disfellowshipped.

Now this is real news. Impactful news. Heartwarming news. What a joy it is to read the Kigali Commitment, to see rock-ribbed fidelity by church leaders around the world and particularly in the global south. It is to a large extent Africans who will stand and defend England’s former orthodoxy—or, better, the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3)! Oh, the irony. British colonialism exported the 39 Articles and the Book of Common Prayer and now, to the seeming chagrin of the Brits, those colonies took it all a bit more seriously than they intended.

So now 85% of global Anglicans are calling on Canterbury and the Church of England to repent of their apostasy. And their framing is exactly right: by its doctrinal embrace of sexual perversion, Canterbury has severed fellowship with the Christian church, not the other way around. GAFCON represents Anglicanism, not Canterbury. The Kigali Commitment goes on to say that that they no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as “first among equals,” but rather as someone who must repent.

Even so, from my point of view the cause for celebration is not really in its churchly and/or political implications. Rather, the cause for celebration is theological. As a born-and-bred Westminster Confession Presbyterian, I cannot tell you how impressed I am by this declaration:

The current divisions in the Anglican Communion have been caused by radical departures from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some within the Communion have been taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophies of this world (Colossians 2:8).  Such a failure to hear and heed God's Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole. 

The Bible is God’s Word written, breathed out by God as it was written by his faithful messengers (2 Timothy 3:16). It carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom. 

God’s good Word is the rule of our lives as disciples of Jesus and is the final authority in the church.

That’s … it. That is what it all amounts to. Will we hear and heed God’s Word or not? “Did God really say… ?” has been the Serpent’s gambit from the beginning, and it is encouraging that most of the world’s Anglicans see this antithesis so clearly. It is either “hollow and deceptive philosophies of this world” or it will be God’s Word. There is no neutral option. Moreover, this description of the attributes of Scripture ought to be bolded and italicized. In fact, that is just what I’ll do:

[The Bible] carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom.

Friends, this is a full-throated Reformational doctrine of Scripture. It is a rejection of a kind of rationalism that puts the Bible “in the dock” to be judged by human reason (i.e., it bears God’s “own authority”); a rejection of all kinds of critical interpretive theories (i.e., "is its own interpreter”); a rejection of its need to be “supplemented” by human traditions or experience (i.e., Rome and forms of mysticism); an affirmation that we are ever to submit to it rather than the other way around (i.e., cannot “be overturned by human wisdom”).

An outstanding statement, as is their recitation of the causes of the current rupture in communion and call for repentance. I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Above all, this serves to temper my (admittedly growing) cynicism about the state of Christianity in the world. I would not have predicted that a global organization so vast and broad and diverse as Anglicanism could craft and settle on so uncompromising a theological statement. I praise God for it, and may their tribe increase.

So, as you go about your business in the midst of our fleeting, ephemeral, noisy, distracting times, remember what a great Anglican writer once wrote:

“Aslan is on the move.”

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