I describe myself as an Oxymoronic Anarcho-Anglican and I think it’s time to break down in more detail what this label is describing for those folks at home who may be wondering, and also to clarify my own faith in more depth too.
1) Oxymoronic. A slightly humorous play on words combining ‘moron’ and ‘oxymoron’ defined as a figure of speech in which two apparently contradictory words, in our case ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Anglican’, are fused together into one word. A Moron is a very stupid person that in my mind is expressed as a punk parody of the word. I obviously do not consider myself to be stupid even if you may think I am dear reader!
2) Anarcho: A person who believes in and promotes an anarchistic way of life. In this sense I mean one who does not obey the ‘Archons’, who in Gnostic myths were the servants of the ‘Demiurge’ or the semi-architect who devised the fallen aspect of our planet. Another way to imagine the Demiurge, to use computer speak, is like a virus that has put a line of bad code into earth’s program, while the Archons are replicas of the Virus that reverse true meanings and spawn fake truth. The Archons display no originality at all, they merely imitate. They are what St Paul described as: ‘The Rulers’, (Archas) and the ‘Cosmic Powers of the Darkness’, (Kosmokratoras of Scotous ), which are the evil powers that we, along with Christ, are advised to struggle against. (Ephesians 6:12)
3) Anglican: A member of the Church of England. Anglicans are a part of a world- wide Episcopalian Church. Episcopalians are those who accept the top down rule of Bishops and other members of the clergy who reverse the true meaning of what a Bishop is, by assuming that they have power to rule over other Christians, rather than Christ’s real message of those who rule should be the lowly servants of all.
It should be now becoming clearer that our ‘oxymoron’ is not as contradictory as it first appears. The description that I employ here is really a critique of the so-called apostolic succession that the Anglican Communion claims to be upholding. Whilst I celebrate the historic roots of the Episcopalian Church, I am critical of its pyramidal top-down method of governance that is contrary to the teachings of Jesus. While the rule of the Bishops, (not to mention the Queen of England who is in fact the real ruler in charge here), is apparently benign, it is still the case that Anglicans are supposed to conform to the dictates of those above us, even when, as in my case, we often end up disagreeing with the way the ‘C of E’ goes about its business.
Back to the myth of the Demiurge, who is the fake god of our imagination, or who we envisage the true God to be. For example, when we hold on to our ideas of the tribal god of the Israelites, or, even worse, as an ‘angry jealous old man in the sky', rather than say, the concept of a loving God who is described as the ‘Ground of Being’ by theologians like Paul Tillich. Even though this description is still a concept and therefore is still a ‘Fake’ image of the ineffable- too much to be expressed in words. Thus I propose that the genuine Christian idea of the true God is actually more akin to the Chinese ‘Tao’ than to some demiurgic deity of our imagination.
It is then not such a stretch to imagine Christ as face of the true loving God, the Father and Mother of us all, sent to free us from the Prison Planet we are currently entrapped in by the Archons that employ all manner of torture and suffering through war and misrule, (both spiritual archons as well as human), that Jesus as an anointed avatar of the true God, came to liberate us from.
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