Denial Can Be Deadly

In discussing the current troubles in the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Armagh takes up where his predecessor left off in pushing blarney:

I have yet to meet any "leader" who does not treat with the utmost respect and indeed reverence the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. I have heard no one in this crisis deny the fundamental tenets of the faith as Anglicans have received them.

This is a bad joke. It’s tempting to laugh and mock and think no more of it. More blarney from those Irish!

But statements of denial from prominent archbishops, even from relatively orthodox ones such as ++York, reveal what may be the greatest danger to the Anglican Communion – an unwillingness to effectively deal with apostasy in its midst, even to the point of denial.

The Anglican Communion, at least in the West, is like a man with gangrene in denial. (And since St. Paul compares false teaching with gangrene in 2 Timothy 2:17, that’s a very fair analogy.) And the man (or his doctors) not only doesn’t take precautions to isolate the problem and keep it from spreading, he denies that there is a problem in the first place!

“Oh that? Ah, it’s just a bruise. Eh, it’s gotten a little bigger. It’s no big deal.”

That’s what we have in the Anglican Communion. We have leaders who not only don’t discipline apostate bishops, who not only don’t seek to at least quarantine and isolate their false teaching and practices, we have leaders like ++Armagh and ++York who deny there is apostasy in the first place.

Even a cursory examination of the New Testament and of recent church history reveals that denial about apostasy can have the same results as denial about gangrene – death.