In June 2008, some eleven hundred Anglicans — among them nearly three hundred bishops — gathered in Jerusalem for the first Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). The document they issued, the Jerusalem Statement, with its fourteen-point Jerusalem Declaration at its heart, has become one of the defining texts of contemporary Anglicanism.

Opening Prayer

Psalm 133. Ecce, quam bonum!

Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, * for brethren to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious oil upon the head, that ran down unto the beard, * even unto Aaron's beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing.

Like as the dew of Hermon, * which fell upon the hill of Sion.

For there the Lord promised his blessing, * and life for evermore.¹

An old problem of Truth and Peace

"Thus saith the Lord; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth . . . These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the Lord. . . .therefore love the truth and peace."[^Zecharia]

"The prophet Zecharia, when he exhorts us to 'love truth and peace," gives pride of place to the Truth, as she is leader and mistress; and he rightly grants the next place to Peace, as she is her attendant. For by its very nature the Truth is always fair and just, acceptable to God, and salutary to all who profess her. But Peace, if she should deviate from the pathway of Truth, would become unfair, offensive to God, and destructive to eveyone who walks in her ways. Hence when the apostle Paul exhorts each and every Christian to dwell in peace with all fellow-humans, he makes only two restrictions: 'as much as it lies within you' and 'if it is possible' [Rom 12:18]--that is, on the condition that the truth be professed."²

As martyrs from John and Stephen to our brothers and sisters who will not submit to Islam today demonstrate, dealing with with a false call to false unity is nothing new. Scripture and history inform us of the proper response. The Lord told Zecharaia to build on a foundation of truth, Christ, truth incarnate who suffered and died for the love of his neighbor, summarized the law as first loving God (truth) and and second loving your neighbor (peace), and how our only comfort in life and death relies on the fact they can not be separated. The theologians of Leiden, dealing with theology they found repugnant, and recovering from repression, defended the unity of their faith by defending their beliefs as outlined in the Three Forms of Unity. Their call was simple, truth and peace.

The Anglican branch of Christ's church is at a similar junction, and the faithful are responding similarly, with truth and peace. The Jerusalem Statement is central to that response.

Why Jerusalem, and why 2008

Trouble had been brewing for decades, showing up changes to liturgy and theology around the world, but it came to a head at the turn of the 21st century.

The gathering was born of crisis. The 1998 Lambeth Conference had affirmed, in Resolution I.10, the historic Christian teaching on marriage and sexual ethics; the consecration of a bishop in a same-sex partnership in the American Episcopal Church in 2003 made plain that parts of the Communion did not consider that teaching binding. Years of communiqués, commissions, and unheeded calls for restraint followed. By 2008 many primates — particularly of the Global South provinces, where most of the world's Anglicans now live — concluded that the Communion's instruments could not, or would not, guard its faith. Many of the bishops at Jerusalem declined that summer's Lambeth Conference; GAFCON met the month before it.

What the Declaration says

The Jerusalem Declaration is brief — fourteen numbered tenets — and deliberately unoriginal, in the best sense: it stakes its claim on the classical formularies rather than on novelties of its own. It confesses the gospel of God's grace and the Lordship of Christ; the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures as God's Word written, to be read in their plain and canonical sense; the four ecumenical councils and the three catholic creeds; the Thirty-Nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church; the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer; and the historic ordinal. It upholds marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, presses the priority of the Great Commission, and — the point on which the controversy turned — rejects the authority of churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed, while praying for their repentance and return.

Notably, the Statement insisted that those gathered were not leaving Anglicanism but contending for it: the movement styled itself a fellowship of confessing Anglicans within the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

What has come of it

The most visible fruit on this continent was the Anglican Church in North America, formed in 2009 and recognized by the GAFCON primates, which gathered many of the clergy and congregations that had left or been forced from the Episcopal Church. Subsequent conferences — Nairobi in 2013, Jerusalem again in 2018, Kigali in 2023 — have reaffirmed and sharpened the Declaration's claims, the Kigali Commitment going so far as to declare the Communion's historic instruments of unity no longer fit to guard its doctrine.

Why it matters here

Whatever one makes of the ecclesiastical politics, the Jerusalem Declaration is striking for where it points: backward, to the Bible in the common tongue, the creeds, the Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer. Those are precisely the texts this family of sites exists to serve — the Daily Office prayed from the classical Prayer Book, and the Scriptures read whole and in parallel. The Declaration wagers that Anglicanism's future runs through its formularies. On that point, at least, this commonplace book is happy to agree.

Links

https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-abuja-affirmation/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-future-has-arrived/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-plano-statement/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/gafcon-iv-the-kigali-commitment/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/letter-to-the-churches-gafcon-assembly-2018/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/a-communique-from-the-gafcon-primates-council/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-heart-of-gafcon/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/nairobi-communique-2016/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/nairobi-communique-and-commitment/ https://gafcon.org/communique-updates/the-jerusalem-statement/

The family design language now travels beyond the web sites: there is a presentation theme for Bento, the slide deck that ships as a single self-contained HTML file.

Download RiteAndRubric_Theme.bento.html — or simply follow the link and it opens in your browser, editor and all. The file is marked as a template, so every open mints a fresh deck and the theme itself stays pristine. Right-click and Save link as… to keep a copy.

What is in it

Six slides, each doubling as a style guide for an idiom you can copy into your own decks:

1. Cover — the brand treatment with the double-gold rule and a faint watermark cross that drifts slowly across the paper.
2. The palette — all eight design tokens as labelled swatches, straight from the sites' stylesheet: paper #faf6ec, ink #2b2117, gold #8a6d2f, rubric red #8e1b1b, and the rest.
3. Typography — serif body copy, spaced capitals standing in for the sites' small-caps, rubrics in red italic with the pilcrow, and the family card idiom.
4. Tables — a comparison grid with a gold header and faint gold zebra.
5. Charts — gold bars on paper with muted axes, and a headline number that counts up.
6. The quotation — the blockquote idiom: gold bar, italic serif, spaced-caps attribution.

The shared chrome — kicker, headline, double rule, footer — keeps stable element identities across the slides, so it glides from slide to slide rather than popping. Keep those in place when you edit and your deck will carry the same quiet motion.

Few words in theology carry more freight, or invite more caricature, than Calvinism. To some it names a tulip-shaped syllogism about who can be saved; to others, the whole granite edifice of Reformed Christianity. The truth is larger than the first and more particular than the second.

The man and the tradition

John Calvin (1509–1564) was a French humanist lawyer turned reformer, the great systematizer of the second generation of the Reformation. His Institutes of the Christian Religion — a slim catechetical handbook in 1536, a four-book summa by 1559 — gave Protestant theology its most enduring architecture. But the tradition that bears his name was never his alone. Zwingli and Bullinger in Zürich, Bucer in Strasbourg, Knox in Scotland, and a host of others built what is more properly called the Reformed tradition, of which Calvin is the most famous voice.

At its center is not predestination but the majesty of God: the conviction that salvation, from first to last, is God's gracious work, and that nothing — worship, church order, the conscience of princes — stands outside his sovereignty.

Where the five points came from

The famous "five points" were not Calvin's outline but a rebuttal. In 1610 the followers of Jacobus Arminius issued a five-article Remonstrance qualifying the Reformed doctrines of election and grace. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) — an international assembly that included delegates of the Church of England — answered point for point: total depravity, unconditional election, definite (or "limited") atonement, effectual grace, and the perseverance of the saints. The TULIP acronym itself is a much later mnemonic, an English-language convenience of the twentieth century, and Reformed divines have grumbled about its adequacy ever since.

The English reception

The Church of England drank from the Reformed stream, but through her own cup. Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles treats predestination and election with striking pastoral care — the doctrine is "full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons," and dangerous only when made a subject of curious speculation. Archbishop Whitgift's more sharply Calvinist Lambeth Articles of 1595 never obtained authority; the milder settlement of the Articles and the Prayer Book did. In the seventeenth century the Laudian and Arminian turn pulled the Church another way, and in the eighteenth the old debate flared again between Whitefield's Calvinism and Wesley's Arminianism — a quarrel between friends that neither ever quite won.

The Prayer Book tradition, including the 1928 American book, keeps Cranmer's deep Augustinianism — "we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves" — while declining to resolve on paper what the Articles leave to the mystery of God.

Reading further

The texts behind the debate are the best place to begin: Romans 8 and 9, Ephesians 1, and John 6, all readable in parallel translations at bible.riteandrubric.com. Whatever one concludes about the five points, the Reformed insistence that grace is grace — unearned, prior, and persevering — is simply the old Augustinian faith of the western Church, and the Prayer Book prays it on every page.

It is one of history's small ironies that the most influential eschatological system in American Protestantism was devised by an Anglican clergyman. John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) was ordained in the Church of Ireland before leaving it for the fledgling Plymouth Brethren, among whom, in the 1830s, he worked out the scheme now called dispensationalism.

The system

Dispensationalism reads the Bible as the story of successive economies — dispensations — in which God tests man under different arrangements. The classic count is seven: innocence in Eden, conscience after the fall, human government after the flood, promise from Abraham, law from Sinai, grace in the present church age, and the coming kingdom, a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth.

Two convictions give the system its distinctive shape. First, a consistently literal reading of prophecy: promises made to national Israel are to be fulfilled by national Israel, not absorbed into the Church. Israel and the Church remain two peoples of God with two destinies. Second, and following from it, the church age is a parenthesis between the sixty-ninth and seventieth "weeks" of Daniel; it will end with the secret catching-up — the rapture — of believers before a seven-year tribulation, after which Christ returns publicly to reign.

Its remarkable career

Darby's system might have remained a Brethren peculiarity had America not taken it up. The prophecy conferences of the late nineteenth century spread it; the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) printed it in the margins of the Authorized Version, where it acquired something close to canonical prestige; Dallas Theological Seminary, founded under Lewis Sperry Chafer, gave it academic form. By the time of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Left Behind novels (1995 onward), the rapture and the tribulation timetable had become, for millions, simply what the Bible teaches. More recent "progressive dispensationalists" have softened the hard line between Israel and the Church, bringing the system closer to the broader tradition.

The older reading

Classical Anglicanism inherited a different way with these texts. The creeds confess simply that Christ "shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead" — one return, one judgment, one everlasting kingdom. The western Church since Augustine has generally read the thousand years of Revelation 20 as the present reign of Christ with his saints, not a future earthly administration; indeed the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 expressly condemned the "millenarians," and though that article was dropped when the Thirty-Nine were settled, the Prayer Book tradition kept the older sobriety. Covenant theology, dispensationalism's chief rival, reads the Scriptures as one unfolding covenant of grace, with the Church as the Israel of God — heir, not interloper.

Weighing it

Dispensationalism deserves fairer treatment than it often gets from its critics: it took the whole Bible with immense seriousness, put prophecy charts in the hands of laymen who then read the prophets, and fueled genuine missionary zeal. Its weaknesses are the mirror of its strengths — a hermeneutic that can fragment the one story of redemption, and a habit of reading the morning newspaper into the book of Revelation that has not aged well through a century of failed timetables.

The remedy, as ever, is the text itself. Daniel, the Olivet Discourse, Romans 9–11, and Revelation are all at bible.riteandrubric.com, where the translations can be laid side by side — and the lectionary will walk you through them in the Church's own unhurried time.

A commonplace book is an old habit: a bound volume into which a reader copies passages worth keeping — prayers, verses, arguments, curiosities — so that they may be found again. This site is a commonplace book for the Rite & Rubric family: a place for notes on the projects, the texts behind them, and whatever else seems worth setting down.

The family of sites

The heart of the family is Rite & Rubric, the Daily Office of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer — Morning and Evening Prayer with the 1945 lectionary, the Coverdale Psalter, and lessons from the King James Version, computed for every day of the church year.

Alongside it stands the Bible reader, where you can read the Holy Bible in multiple translations, up to four side by side, with the original tongues within easy reach.

Posts here will announce new features, explain how the sites are put together, and take up questions of liturgy, text, and translation as they arise. If you would like to follow along, there is an RSS feed.