Its latest marquee posting plays on tales of the Arabian Nights, reading “1001 Shades of Grace.” But until recently, the sign outside Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church in London, Ont. made an even racier play on the title of a contemporary bestselling erotic novel.
The Anglican church’s previous sign read “50 Shades of Grace,” echoing Fifty Shades of Grey–the title of the first book in U.K. author E.L. James’s sexually explicit trilogy.
After reading the article, I can’t image that this is still and orthodox parish, but it is sad considering that one former rector at Bishop Cronyn was Dyson Hague. After serving as rector at Bishop Cronyn, Hague contributed to The Fundamentals, showing higher criticism for the pseudo-scholarship it is as well as defending the centrality of substitutionary atonement. If you’ve never read his “At-One-Ment by Propitiation†definitely check it out. Hague was among several Anglicans, on both sides of the Atlantic, which also included Bishop J.C. Ryle who contributed to the series of essays defending orthodox Christianity from the modernist creeping into the old established denominations through the likes of Henry Emerson Fosdick and others. It also sparked, for better or worse, the fundamentalist movement, which really has two streams. The well know anti-intellectual stream tied to rural southern evangelicalism and the intellectually robust stream tied to men like Hague and small breakaway denominations like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, tied to one of American’s greatest theologians J. Gresham Machen. Indeed Machen was mentored by another contributed to The Fundamentals, B.B. Warfield, who book on the inspiration of Scripture is one of the best modern treatments. It is sad that with such as robust history of defending the faith and association with great men of God, this parish should come to associated itself instead with poor written pornographic pop fiction.