Why is this relevant to me?

It has been brought to my attention that some of my newer readers are unaware of my mission statement.  While Ogre certainly has other fish to fry, for myself, this mission is simple.  I want to take that question and bury it in facts.  One of my realizations is that the quest for “relevance” has, in fact, almost paradoxically, rendered the Gospel untaught and unknown to vast numbers of nominal Christians.  This is a situation that, once it was shown to me, in all facets of the word, angered me.  I was angry for spending half of my life in the dark.  I was angry for my own culpability in my failure to seek out the truth (only later understanding that the Holy Spirit seeks me.) I was angry for the failure of my church in my youth and through my young adulthood to teach me what I regard today as the essentials of the faith.  The bottom line is that I was made to do the heavy lifting that should have been done on Sundays by the church.  I perceive that the virus of Protestant Liberalism has so infected the traditional Protestant churches, that the Gospel has been lost.  Therefore, as I leave the world of physicians and patients, I hope to turn my healing energies to the church militant in general and the church corporate in specific.

Why is this relevant to you, my dear reader?  You are a part of the church militant by definition.  The church militant are those Christian believers who are still alive in this present evil age.  But the church corporate is where I level the charge of failure to teach the Gospel, and therefore, as I move forward in the next phase of my life, that is the fertile ground for my skills as healer.  Since those of you who come by these notes through a Bible Study posting are also members of a particular church corporate, you have the opportunity to double dip into my medicine cabinet.

Why should you care?  The Episcopal Church was one of the traditional Protestant denominations that upheld the tenets of the Protestant Reformation.  Knowing why our church exists is important to our culture as a church corporate.  Do we understand the issues that caused Europeans in general, and the English in particular, to split from the Church of Rome?  Are there historical documents that speak specifically to these issues?  For Episcopalians, why do we use a Book of Common Prayer?  From where is this historical piece of literature derived?

When dealing with those questions, I am led naturally to application in the present day.  When diagnosing the current condition of the church militant and the church corporate, I find that the answers to those questions above are no longer known or honored by either.  If you believe that the Gospel is independent of culture and time, and I do, then you will look at cultural forces to be irrelevant in the consideration of the Gospel.  A timeless truth is self defining as independent of those forces.  Would we not expect the Word of God to be such a timeless truth?  Certainly, for timelessness and truthfulness are at the heart of our very understanding of God.  We need the perspective of our past to understand where we have arrived, and to evaluate if that journey was, in fact, a journey with God.

Therefore, in my writings, you will find several threads, several types of posts.  I will tackle particular sections of scripture based upon the conversations and questions that I have during the week.  In these types of posts, I will attempt to exposit the meaning from the traditional reformed position.  In another type of post, I will discuss historical issues relevant to the Reformation in general and the Episcopal Church in particular.  Posts such as the series on the heretics, the historical documents of the Reformation, particularly the 39 Articles as they are our Anglican and Episcopal heritage, will naturally be undertaken to give perspective to our modern conversations.  They are relevant because history is always relevant to modern man.  We build our lives on the shoulders of our ancestors.  Those who forget our history are doomed to make the same mistakes.  One scholar said that we should read at least one source on theology from antiquity, or at least from a different century, for every 5 modern books we read, not because they were necessarily right, but because they made different mistakes.  The third type of post is topical.  Posts on topics such as the Trinity or the Holy Spirit or women in pastoral roles or marriage make up the bulk of those posts.  Those posts are often authored by Ogre, rather than Troll, as often they are confrontational with positions that I find unBiblical.  Those authored by Troll, tend towards the instructive rather than the confrontational.  My style is often reminiscent of the social graces of Trolls and Ogres, and thus we can understand the monikers. 

But the focus of this blog never changes.  I am first and foremost a Christian, who happens to believe that the Reformers of the sixteenth century, following in the tradition of Jesus, Peter, Paul and Augustine, got it right.  Secondly, I am unashamedly Episcopal, unashamed because I know the history of our church and the wisdom of that book we use in worship every Sunday, the Book of Common Prayer.  I also understand that we cannot, as we have done, lose sight of the source text, the Bible, as we worship on Sundays.  The Bible must remain our focus as reformed believers who uphold the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.  My mission statement then is to heal from within.  Nothing that I write is my own.  I stand upon the shoulders of greater men, who ultimately put all of their faith in the meritorious work of Jesus and our imputed righteousness based upon it.  This is the Gospel, and the Gospel is worth defending, teaching, spreading, discussing and learning.  I hope this has helped you understand why I choose some of the topics that I choose, and why I believe that it is relevant to us today.

--Troll--