2. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BIBLE; IT’S CLARITY, AUTHORITY AND SUFFICIENCY GIVE US CONFIDENCE IN WHAT WE BELIEVE AS ANGLICANS.
This is clear from the section on “The Authority of God’s word”:
“The current divisions in the Anglican Communion have been caused by radical departures from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some within the Communion have been taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophies of this world (Colossians 2:8). Such a failure to hear and heed God’s Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole.
The Bible is God’s Word written, breathed out by God as it was written by his faithful messengers (2 Timothy 3:16). It carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom.
God’s good Word is the rule of our lives as disciples of Jesus and is the final authority in the church.” (Emphasis added)
Here we see the Kigali Statement echoing, in different words, the same assertion as the Global South Section 1.6 on the sufficiency of God’s Word written in its plain and canonical sense, and the rejection of any “hermeneutics of skepticism,” which Anglican revisionists have brought to the text of scripture. The Kigali Statement goes on to say of the Bible:
“It grounds, energises and directs our mission in the world. The fellowship we enjoy with our risen and ascended Lord is nourished as we trust God’s Word, obey it and encourage each other to allow it to shape each area of our lives.”
Gafcon continues to stand for the Bible as the very foundation upon which Anglicans have confidence to believe what we believe, to have fellowship with Jesus himself, and to find “energy and direction” for all we do! Therefore, the crisis in the Anglican Communion is not about “differences of opinion” or “secondary matters” of human sexuality. The crisis is about the very basis upon which the Church is constituted, especially when the plain reading of the text is ignored:
“This fellowship is broken when we turn aside from God’s Word or attempt to reinterpret it in any way that overturns the plain reading of the text in its canonical context and so deny its truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency, and thereby its authority (Jerusalem Declaration #2).”
In other words, what is ultimately at stake here is what we have proclaimed for the last 25 years: the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency, and authority of the Bible. For this reason, it is impossible to embrace “pluriform truth” as the Archbishop of Canterbury did at the recent Lambeth Conference 2022. For this reason, GAFCON rejects the Canterbury led communion narrative of “walking together in good disagreement” as the basis for fellowship, much less Communion:
“We reject the claim that two contradictory positions can both be valid in matters affecting salvation. We cannot ‘walk together’ in good disagreement with those who have deliberately chosen to walk away from the ‘faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3). The people of God ‘walk in his ways’, ‘walk in the truth’, and ‘walk in the light’, all of which require that we do not walk in Christian fellowship with those in darkness (Deuteronomy 8:6; 2 John 4; 1 John 1:7).”
Canon Phil takes an in-depth walk through of 8 major take-aways from the @gafconference Kigali Commitment released today. https://t.co/BzhWk6VJnh
— American Anglican (@AnglicanCouncil) April 21, 2023