Within These Latter Days: The Chapel of the Opened Book

The Chapel of the Opened Book, originally the Wilson Street Welsh Wesleyan Chapel, was acquired in 1943 by C H Welch as a base for his mission, building a church on doctrines developed from those of E W Bullinger. Welch’s teaching was centred on Acts 28 Dispensationalism, also referred to as Ultradispensationalism, – holding that the current Divine Dispensation begins at the conclusion of Acts, as the mission to the Gentiles alone (after the failure of Jesus’ and the early Church’s mission to the Jews). The Gospels are therefore not directly relevant to the Church – correct doctrine is based on the later Pauline Epistles. The Chapel’s teachings are summarised as:

1. Full inspiration of the Scriptures

2. Right division of the Scriptures

3. Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ

4. All sufficiency of His one sacrifice

(1) = Fundamentalism – as always necessarily involving a highly selective & ideological reading of the origin text, pretending openness; (2) refers to the importance of the limitation of the literal address of scriptures to their specific audiences (eg Jesus’ words not addressed to us - acknowledged of course by academic Biblical scholarship also as addressing his words solely to his Jewish audience); (3) is of course downplaying the human Jesus, for a largely typical or typological role, other than involvement in: (4) the old sick nightmare dehumanising fantasies of Original Sin, Redemption, Predestination, the Two Seeds etc.

The Chapel’s publishing arm is the Berean Publishing Trust - “And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews. /These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts, 17:10-11). The Chapel of the Opened Book meets on the first Saturday of the month at 3 pm.

The following photos I took October 13, 2012: