I was once invited to a dinner with a Roman Catholic cardinal. He was a friend of Pope John Paul II and had been on of those who elected his successor, Pope Benedict XVI. The main topic of the evening was the state of religious freedom around the world, but the conversation ranged far wider, and it was both deep and delightful.
Just as we were about to finish our coffee and end the evening, he suddenly changed the topic and asked me about the crisis roiling the worldwide Anglican Church. Not wanting to be drawn on what Francis Schaeffer used to call a "soup question" rather than a "dessert question" (one that requires asking early in a meal to do justice to its importance), I replied somewhat lightly, "The Anglican Church is flourishing in many parts of the world, especially in the Global South, but it certainly has huge problems in the West. But then, you had your Borgia popes."
Instead of brushing off the remark, as I expected, the cardinal became serious. "Yes," he said, "Alexander VI (with his record of incest, murder, bribery and corruption) was one of the worst leaders ever to have led the Christian church But he never denied a single article of the Apostle's Creed, whereas several of the Episcopal bishops flout the teaching of the church catholic and deny the very heart of the Christian faith--and still stay on as Christian leaders. That is the shame of the Episcopal Church, and that is unprecedented in Christian history."
The cardinal was correct.
Few churches in two thousand years have tolerated, even celebrated more heresy, syncretism, apostasy, and paganism than the Episcopal Church. To be fair, the Episcopal Church is not alone and many others from the Protestant mainline traditions are hard of their heels. . . .
Many revisionists in the Protestant liberal churches, followed by the extremes of Catholic progressivism and emergent evangelicalism, have reached the point where their thinkers preach "a different gospel", some have joked that they recite the Apostles' Creed with their fingers crossed. And as the above quotation shows, such revisionism is rife with new forms of toxic syncretism. . . .
Today's major battles are quite different, and they require apologists as well as theologians. The issues are mostly external, sometimes triggered by the attacks of critics and scoffers from the outside, but more often set off by Christian capitulation to cultural ideas and behaviors considered so progressive or fashionable that it is unthinkable for Christian not to espouse them too--such as the craven abandonment of the lordship of Jesus, the authority of the Scriptures, and three thousand years of the decisive Jewish and Christian understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman.
[Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books, 2015), p. 209ff.]
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