Charles Gore "Lux Mundi," Bricks Badly Laid

When the first bricks are badly laid, the wall, in the end, will be wonky. When we leave the doctrinal formularies of Reformation Anglicanism and wander the roads of our personal aesthetic tastes, the end result is Charles Gore, liberal Catholicism, and "Lux Mundi." Charles Gore, the popular Principal of Pusey House Oxford, died on this day January 17, 1932. At its best, the Liberal Catholic Movement wanted to "preserve the best of the past in the light of the best of the present so as to build for the best future" (Frank Gavin), but, instead, it spawned a church of theological ambivalence and squishy sentimentalism.

Gore edited and wrote an essay in the influential "Lux Mundi" (12 essays, all by liberal Anglo-Catholic scholars). The collection was subtitled "a series of studies in the religion of the Incarnation." This movement and this book helped steer the Church of England away from the centrality of the cross/atonement to the Incarnation - from a focus on the Bible as God's divinely inspired word to the Bible subject to the authority of science and reason, and from the gospel of proclaimed hope for sinners to a social gospel of obedience.

Whenever the church moves away from the centrality of the Cross of Christ (the Atonement) to focus mainly on the Incarnation (the life and moral teaching of Jesus as an example to imitate), it moves away from the Bible's main focus of God's redemptive plan. The gravitational shift this book represents is away from God's righteousness imputed to undeserving sinners, to an earned infused righteousness, and our social progress based on obedience and following Jesus' example.

Surely Jesus was born to live the perfectly righteous life that we cannot live as our substitute, but also to die the death we deserve to die. St. Paul reminds us not to lose sight of the cross of our Lord: "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world." (Galatians 6:14).