| On the right lines - Andy Lines |
January 2005 indexI have been reading the biography of Dr Daniel HC Bartlett, the first and only Honorary Secretary of BCMS. The preface states that the “dominating theme (of his life) will be seen as one of positive confession and achievement rather than negative and polemical resistance”. That is the aim of these articles, to draw out the mission significance of our foundation beliefs. Mission is the heartbeat of God; it pervades all scripture and affects everything that Christians do.
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Basis
of the Society Article 7 states:
Belief that the theories of Sacerdotalism concerning the mechanical conveyance of grace in Baptism, Confirmation, the Supper of the Lord, and Ordination, whether these be professed in doctrine or implied in ritual, are “grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but, rather, are repugnant to the Word of God”. ‘Sacerdotalism’ is “the idea that the Christian minister is in any sense a mediator between God and man . . . there is no hint in scripture that he is an indispensable link between an individual Christian and his God.”* The word is derived from the Latin sacerdos, which refers to a sacrificing priest. The quote in our Article, which comes from the famous ‘39 Articles’, is couched in apparently negative terms to 21st Century ears. That is because it is a very serious issue to take Christ’s rightful place as the one mediator. The issue is whether the minister’s role in Christian gatherings detracts from or points to the finished work of Christ. For ‘sacerdotalists’ the emphasis is on what the minister does at meetings, whether baptisms, healings, the Lord’s Supper or whatever. When this Article was written in the 1920’s, moves were being made in the Church of England to follow a more sacerdotal line. This envisaged an increased role for the ‘priest’, making him more indispensable.
Christians in every age need to beware this tendency. I have noticed posters near my local station advertising a meeting where one will witness and experience ‘miracles, healing, faith’, the emphasis being on performance. Are we not guilty of the same danger in our meetings through personality cults or musical performances etc? Is our focus on the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has done for us as revealed in scripture, or have we begun to detract from this by professing or implying that there are other ways? That is why our slogan is ‘God’s Word to God’s World’ and not ‘The Traditions of Men to God’s World’. * “In Understanding Be Men”. T C Hammond
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The
Reformed Anglican emphasis is that the Christian minister is not
doing things in meetings, but rather proclaiming what God has
already done and urging people to live in the light of this. At the
Lord’s Supper, for example, the minister is reminding us of what
Christ has done ‘once for all’, not carrying out another
sacrifice. Thus, when the celebrant wears special clothes to carry
out this function we may be implying things in ritual that the Bible
does not allow.