A Past Response of +FitzSimons Allison to Dr. Radner

I’m slightly harried today due to craziness in the financial markets. But I want to point you to an excellent past response of the Rt. Rev. Dr. C. FitzSimons Allison to past exhortations of Dr. Radner to stay, stay, stay. Yes, that broken record still hasn’t stopped.

Anyway, +Allison shoots down well the view that the faithful traditional thing to do is to stay with the Episcopal Church. This for me was the money paragraph:

. . . the early church knew orthodox teaching to be of such paramount importance, since it involved the salvation of souls (not mere academic differences), that the church must disobey and replace heretical bishops. This has been amply demonstrated by Professor Werner Elert in Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries (Concordia, 1966) in which he shows that, contrary to Radner's lesson, the early church demanded that heretical bishops be repudiated and replaced by orthodox teachers. Certainly we have reason to thank God that Athanasius did not acquiesce in the Arian establishment of his day.

Amen! And Athanasius explicitly rejected the authority of Arian bishops and appointed priests (and perhaps bishops as well) in their territories. Oooooo! Boundary crossings!

So this idea that we should stay bound together with apostate unbelievers indefinitely is crap. Didn’t Paul have some words about that? Hmmmm?