Getting the name right: revisionism

Posted on May 3, 2012 
Filed under Opinion

“By and large you don’t get too many Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors on the campus of a conservative evangelical theological college like ours. When they do, the odds are that the first question is, ‘What do you think is wrong with the world?’

It’s a searching question because it makes you try and boil down all your misgivings into as small a phrase as possible, preferably even a single word. It makes you focus. The short-hand answer is ‘sin’, and put less technically perhaps something like, ‘We have all loved ourselves at the expense of our love of God and of our neighbours.’

In a similar vein, Anglicans at the moment have to answer the question, ‘What do you think is wrong with the Anglican church worldwide?’ Because there’s a pretty widespread agreement something is. And while it is right to answer that question in terms of sin and a disordered love of self, it is also helpful to try and be a bit more specific…”

Dr Mike Ovey at Oak Hill College in London reflects on last week’s address by Archbishop Eliud Wabukala at the FCA Leaders Conference.