(Note: These are my personal responses, and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone else associated with John Mark Ministries.)

Keith Mascord: A Restless Faith: Leaving Fundamentalism in a Quest for God (Xlibris Corporation, 2012).

The well-known ‘curate’s egg’ analogy – good in parts – may apply to Sydney more than to any other Anglican diocese in the world. C S Lewis says somewhere something to the effect that most people come into the Christian faith via the conservative end of the theological spectrum, though many become more theologically liberal as they study the hard questions…

The Sydney Diocese does a better job of introducing thoughtful youngsters to a conservative brand of biblical theology than perhaps any other Anglican group on earth. University and College Christian Union meetings, training conferences, parish Bible study groups/houseparties, and inspirational Katoomba Conventions which attract thousands of earnest seekers-after-Bible-truth have spawned a large number of disciples and propagandists of/for this brand of Christian thinking…

However, ‘Sydney Anglicanism does not have a good reputation in Sydney or around the world’  opines Rev. Dr. Keith Mascord.  In this memoir, Keith, formerly a lecturer in philosophy and pastoral theology at Sydney’s Moore Theological College tells us why.

Mascord – and many others, it seems – have put their complaints about this diocese under two broad headings:  theological/hermeneutical and attitudinal/political. One person in particular gets most of the blame: Philip Jensen, brother of Archbishop Peter Jensen. (I’d give Rev. John Chapman more than one cursory mention on this score: his lower-profile but powerful influence was mainly with a previous generation of tertiary/theological students).

So what are the theological/hermeneutical problems? In random order they include (among others): biblical inerrancy/infallibility and excessive biblical literalism (eg. a literal reading of Genesis 1-11.  Broughton Knox, Moore College’s principal before Peter Jensen, was thought to be a ‘creationist’); women’s leadership over and any teaching role with males is ‘sinful’; an individualized notion of ‘the gospel’ – mainly to do with receiving Jesus as one’s personal saviour to avoid going to hell, with little or no  social justice emphasis;  and ‘pentecostalism’.  Views about these and other  ‘sacred cows’ determine one’s status and acceptability within the tribe that is Sydney Anglicanism. ‘Philip Jensen was, and remains, a seasoned boundary marker’ writes Mascord.

Just one hermeneutical issue: Throughout his life, (from the age of three !) Keith has been fascinated by the story of Noah’s flood. Like no other biblical story, it became pivotal in his ‘lifelong dialogue with God’. The problems are huge: * Where did all the (4.4 billion cubic kilometres of) water come from and where did it all go after the flood, and in so short a time? * How did the fresh-water fish survive their marine environment being swamped with salt water – or vice versa if the water was fresh? * How did 30 million modern and extinct species of organisms – including between 50,000 and 75,000 species of birds and animals – all fit on to the ark? * How did animals like the Tasmanian tiger cross uncrossable seas to return to their specialized environments and how did the sloth, which doesn’t walk on land, manage to get all the way back to South America…???  What does Mascord do with all this? Take your pick: the historicization of myth or the mythologization of history. So, of course, a flood of that magnitude could not have happened – nor much else in terms of the historicity of stories in Genesis 1-11. (I’d be interested to read, in future editions of this important book, Mascord’s key sermon on Noah’s flood – his ‘homiletical’ take on this story and its application to our lives today. Re the historicity question: I’d tend to regard the story of angels having sex with humans and creating giants as mythical, but my hunch is that the patriarchs were real historical persons).

Keith Mascord is strongly influenced by Paul Ricoeur’s three-part hermeneutic ‘involving movement from a “first naivete” through critical engagement to a “second naivete”‘ (125). Another popular version: moving from simplicity this side of complexity,  through complexity, to simplicity on the other side… Fundamentalists are frightened about doing this exercise in hard thinking: cognitive dissonance must be avoided at all costs.

And what does Keith Mascord actually believe? Essentially: ‘The… Jesus event is the best possible explanation’ for the truth of the Christian gospel  (84). ‘There are good reasons to believe in God, including, supremely… the man Jesus’ (104). Another: ‘Eternal conscious torment seems excessive, to say the least’; ‘never-ending lonely torment [is] infinitely worse than any human torturer could devise’ (99, 100).

Back to what the Philip Jensenites do with all this: Read the book for the political stuff, whereby lesser qualified-but-‘orthodox’ people are preferred over more talented freer thinkers. But, worse, ‘attitudinal’ adjectives like these describe how the protagonists of this sophisticated-but-bigoted ‘conservative evangelicalism’ come across to others: arrogant, combative, opinionated, abrasive, inflexible, deceptive, black-and-white… the list goes on. Rather than there being a commitment to ‘speak the truth (as one sees it) in love’ and humility there has developed an ‘us and them’ fortress mentality, where ‘questioning, doubt or dissent is discouraged and even punished’.

But there are – and always have been – bright and worthy lights on the Sydney Anglican horizon. I too was privileged to know Tony Doran, and I agree with Keith about that man’s being a saint (my term). But he, and other more progressive Evangelical scholars like Bill Dumbrell, Graham Cole, Bill Lawton et. al. became ‘outsiders or fringe-dwellers to the dominant Sydney ethos’ (131).

I reckon Keith Mascord is a prophet: I hope he and his friends’ warnings are treated with some honour…

Here are some interesting snippets I underlined:

* Surveys throughout 15 years of teaching at Moore College with classes of between 30 and 60 students indicated that those who had come to faith or been nurtured into faith as children were least likely to doubt (8)

* (From a friend’s email): According to an Army Quartermaster, Moses would have needed 1,500 tons of food each day to feed 2 or 3 million people in the desert – [the equivalent of] two freight trains, each a mile long! (90)

* When Peter Jensen became archbishop he set a vision for the conversion within ten years of 10 percent of Sydney into ‘Bible-believing churches’ (147). But numbers since then have fluctuated up and down… In 2009 there were about 5000 fewer people attending Anglican Churches in Sydney than in Archbishop Harry Goodhew’s final year as archbishop (2001) (230)

* The Anglican Church League has an agenda of restricting/halting people’s ‘progression within the diocese’ if there is any ‘suspicion of being Pentecostal, liberal or feminist’ (153)

* ‘There is nothing quite like getting to know someone who is gay to disabuse you of your prejudices and fears’ (212)

* The danger of Sydney conservative evangelicalism is that ‘it ceases to be open to change and reform. In being defensive, it takes the tenor or spirit of reactionary fundamentalism’ (228)

* ‘If our Christian youth are known less for their “love, joy, peace and patience” and more for their suspicion, coldness, aggression and self-righteousness, then we have failed them; and the spirit that animates them is not the Spirit of Christ’ (236)

A small correction: yes there were one or two women leaders of Evangelical Unions before the ‘Sydney Anglican mafia/thought police’ (terms I hear everywhere, but which I think Keith doesn’t employ here) took over: in my time as an IVF staffworker a woman – whose name eludes me now – was elected president of the Macquarie University EU.

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Notes:

A disclaimer or two: During the years 1968-70 I wandered around the tertiary campuses of Australia as a staffworker with the Intervarsity Fellowship (IVF), speaking at Evangelical Union meetings and University/college missions. Before and after that I was often invited to Sydney Anglican churches and their youth groups. Later I ‘graduated’ to Anglican diocesan clergy and other conferences around Australia – 20-30 of them – mainly to talk about clergy self-care, ‘church growth’ and missiology. But from the 1980s and beyond, invitations to speak to student groups mostly dried up. Reason: the all-pervasive Sydney Anglican influence within the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

In the meantime, with a penchant (my friends tell me) for ‘never having an unpublished thought’ my developing stance on various issues – mainly theological and missiological – resulted in my books (especially Recent Trends Among Evangelicals, launched in 1986 by the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr. David Penman) and articles being strongly critiqued by various Sydney Evangelical opinion-leaders. [1]

[1] Recent Trends Among Evangelicals (et. seq). See my article titled ‘Dr Jensen’s Jesus’

See also here and here . Use the search facility on the John Mark Ministries website for more…

For others’ reviews, visit Keith’s website

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Rowland Croucher

John Mark Ministries

June 2012

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Others’ Comments 

From a reputable scholar/clergyman – an ex-Moore College senior student who subscribes to a broader Evangelical stance these days:  ‘I personally think that Sydney Anglicans just need to laugh at themselves a bit.’

And a journalist who knows the Sydney scene well: ‘ Yes, the Jensens are mostly to blame, along with Chappo, and Rob Forsyth, and the masses of young men streaming out of St Matthias. The more Lausanne evangelicals like Bishop John Reid or a Paul Barnett were replaced by ideologues.’