Church of England – Page 7 – All Things Considered

22 Mar

Prophets To Tickle Our Ears

Christians with traditional beliefs about issues such as homosexuality should be given “reasonable accommodation” in law, Britain’s most senior woman judge has said. Lady Hale, deputy president of the Supreme Court, said the UK is “less respectful” towards people with religious views than other countries, despite its long Christian traditions. She questioned whether the current “hard line” approach to discrimination claims, based on EU law, could be sustained in the long term. Her comments, in a lecture at Yale law School in the US, follow a series of cases in which British Christians claimed to be suffering religious discrimination but lost their cases. They include Shirley Chaplin, a nurse from Exeter, who was banned from wearing a cross at work as well as Gary McFarlane, a former Relate counsellor, and Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar, who both lost their jobs after resisted performing tasks they said went against their religious beliefs.

Well said, Baroness Hale!

We should compare and contrast her words with those of Archbishop Justin Welby, the man who ought to be in the forefront of the promoting of Christian values – and indeed the truth of the Christian gospel. But given friends like Welby, Christians have no need of enemies. He says, “It is absurd and impossible to ignore overwhelming changes in social attitudes.” This echoes Rowan Williams’ remarks last year to the effect that Christians “…have a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.” Thus we might phrase the Welby-Williams revised gospel as “Repent not, but be ye indeed conformed to this world.”

So here we see those who were appointed to defend the Christian faith and its moral teachings instead undermining both faith and teachings. It’s as if they should have declared, “And the Lord said unto his disciples, ‘Go ye into all the land and set up focus groups that ye might understand and know what it is that is desired of the people: that give unto them.”

Can you imagine Isaiah the prophet or Jeremiah the seer preaching to King Ahab or to the apostate Jeroboam, son of Nebat, “Keep not the Law of the Lord but what seemeth pleasurable unto the crowd, that do. And behold, I give unto thee a new commandment: Thou shalt do as thou bloody well likest”?

There are words to describe the Welby-Williams axis: “Beware of false prophets which come to thee in sheep’s clothing but underneath they are ravening wolves…white sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

10 Mar

More Gorm, Please, Professor Wilkinson

God help those being taught theology at St John’s College, Durham where the principal is Rev’d Professor David Wilkinson. He came on Radio Four’s Thoughtless Today at a quarter to eight this morning to tell us that we’ve learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all previous history. A pity we haven’t at the same time learned to use the brain a bit better than Wilkinson did. I suppose it was rather early in the day. First he caricatured Greek philosophy to a degree that would have Plato and Aristotle suing for misrepresentation, for neither of those gentlemen believed what was attributed to them by Wilkinson: “Body evil, mind good.”

We were then treated to Wilkinson’s own view on the subject. He reckons that the body, the mind and the soul are three different parts of the human person which interact. Now forgive me if I comment on this opinion with the use of some technical jargon. Wilkinson’s view is what we philosophers call gormless. For body, mind and soul are not three things; they are three aspects of one and the same thing. The mind and the soul do not inhabit the body like ghosts in a machine. For the body is material, and the only things that can exist inside a material thing are other material things. Thus the body is the material aspect of the person, the mind is the mental aspect of the same person, and the soul (if there is such a thing) is the person’s spiritual aspect.

Wittgenstein warned us against first forming a picture of something and then becoming enslaved by that picture. For the picture may be a false picture – just like the one drawn by Wilkinson, in fact.

07 Mar

Thoughtless Every Day

I never imagined I would one day disagree with Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, the best (the only?) bishop we have. But he has just said that Dawn French – the Vicar of Dibley – should not be allowed to present Thought for the Day on 29^th March, Red Nose Day, because “this would detract from the programme’s seriousness.” At times like this, I’m tempted to echo John McEnroe’s admonishing of the referee: “You cain’t be serious, Michael!” TFTD serious? Don’t make me laugh.

The genial Today presenter Evan Davis says he would like to hear “serious and spiritually-minded secularists” on Thought for the Day. But, with one or two distinguished exceptions, these are the only sort of speakers we ever hear in that slot. There is nothing authentically religious about TFTD. It is an anodyne, multi-faith political pep-talk from the soft Left and so bum-clenchingly politically-correct as to be beyond satire. It is the social gospel – only without the gospel.

The presenters always trendily try to link their “thought” to an item in the day’s news:

“Jesus didn’t go in for binge-drinking but, after a long day chastising the money-changers and the greedy City bankers, there was nothing he liked better than to chill out over a few beers with his disciples – though he was careful not to exceed the recommended daily alcohol units…”

“Guru Nanak did not stigmatise obese people but showed his love for them by distributing low calorie curry dinners…”

“In one of his many speeches about global warming, the Buddha…”

The array of TFTD presenters is like Grand Guignol. There is Anne Atkins, formerly the terrifically scary bible-basher, now mutated into a terrifically scary agony aunt and post-modern novelist. And the faux-proletarian Dr Giles Fraser, fully paid-up member of the Church Militant Tendency.

Lord Harries, the retired Bishop of Oxford, comes on every few weeks to support embryo research and always justifies the killing of embryos by saying that many of them die anyway – a vivid demonstration of TFTD’s non-sequiturial style: like arguing that because some people fall under buses, it’s OK to push them.

There is a tremendously progressive Muslim with a name and an intonation that sounds like Moaner Cyd Eekie. They still nostalgically wheel out Rabbi Lionel Blue now and again to tell us that he’s not very well, Gay and trying his best to exorcise his Woody Allenish obsession with the Grim Reaper. I haven’t heard Bishop “Tom” Butler for a while. It was always nice to hear him reminisce about how, returning soberly from a reception at the Irish Embassy, he was discovered lying down in the back seat of someone else’s car, throwing toys out of the window: “I’m a bishop. It’s what I do!”

Hardly any of the contributors to TFTD are what you might call religious. Rather they translate traditional biblical stories into secular metaphors. For example, the feeding of the 5000 was no miracle but only a lesson in “sharing.” No more than a socialist picnic. Jesus did not rise physically from the tomb: it was just a case of the disciples’ subjective experience of “new life” – though how they gained this experience if Jesus remained dead they don’t explain.

There is no need for a religious slot these days. The BBC relentlessly preaches its own syncretistic secular religion, ecumenically combining anti-Americanism, hatred of Israel, addiction to pop-music, multiculturalism, the adulation of tawdry celebs and left wing playwrights and an obsession with climate change. Amen.

Good morning, John, good morning Sarah and good morning Jim… On the other hand what really would be a turn up is if a traditional, full-believing Christian were ever allowed on the programme. No chance. He wouldn’t get closer than a Sabbath day’s journey.

06 Mar

Dumber Still and Dumber the Church’s Bounds are Set

Love Life: Live Lent.

The Archbishop of York is taking seriously his responsibility for the spiritual life of the nation. He has written the Foreword to three booklets to guide us through Lent: one for “The Family”; one for “Adults and Youth” and the other for “Kids.” Or is that last one for nanny goats?

These glossy booklets feature Mr Men style cartoon pictures whom we must suppose are meant to represent the general public. Achingly politically-correct with all races represented – but no fat people or smokers. Dumbing-down beyond the farthest reaches of infantilisation, the booklets urge us to “Do fun things together. Create a space in your home…a corner of a room…an understairs cupboard… a shelf…make a prayer den using furniture and blankets…gather some objects that are fun to touch, feel and smell: a piece of velvet, feathers, a tray of sand, lavender bags or pine cones.” These should be enough to satisfy at least some of the more mentionable fetishists among us.

And what are we supposed to do in the prayer space? “Take in some pebbles, shells or feathers” – presumably to demonstrate impeccable ecumenical relations with primitive animists and tree-huggers. And prayers are supplied: “Dear God, make wrong things right…” But this is not God; only the sentimental wish-fulfilment of Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy We are even educated into the correct manual acts to perform while praying this desolate prayer: “Shake your finger from side to side for ‘wrong’ and then do thumbs up for ‘right’.”

You feel there should be a caution not to do this near a window in case the neighbours see you and phone for the men in white coats.

Lent involves us in acts of practical devotion too. So, “Give a lollipop to your lollipop person.”

Of course, as always in the Church of England these days, the sheer blithering inanities only faintly disguise the right-on political hard sell:

“Email or write to your MP about a global poverty issue… Buy a fair Trade Easter egg” But what, if you follow the advice of many leading economists who claim so called Fair Trade does nothing to help the poor, and recommend free trade instead?

The only orthodoxy we find in these booklets is environmentalist demagoguery and the pagan superstition of global warming: “Help lighten our load on the planet… defrost your fridge and find out how climate change affects poorer people…help stop global climate change: recycle your rubbish save trees, use both sides of the paper…”

(When doing what, by the way?)

Lent is supposed to be a time when we repent of our sins. But the only sins found here are those of not subscribing to the Christian socialist manifesto and global warming denial.

No wonder the pews are emptying faster than ever, when these booklets represent the mind of the Church of England. Lent is for deepening our understanding of the faith and for growing nearer to God. These booklets contain no nourishment for those tasks.

What might the Archbishop have offered, if he had been in his right mind? That we should all begin and end the day by saying the Lord’s Prayer. Read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel written in the matchless English of The Book of Common Prayer for each of the six weeks of Lent. Perhaps say the Psalms set for every day. Try to attend an early morning or lunchtime weekday service of Holy Communion. Competent shepherds of their sheep would also have recommended some spiritual reading.

These patronising booklets are worse than a joke, worse than useless. They ape the trite and gaudy language and images of a debased advertising culture, babyfied and debauched, and apply it to the Christian Gospel. But faith cannot be taught in this way. It cannot be communicated by the thing it is not, the thing that is actually anathema to it. People have to be taught. These booklets only insult the intelligence of the public. There is no Christianity in “Live Life: Love Lent” – only a blasphemous parody of the faith.

24 Feb

God and Evil

This is widely agreed as the Big Problem in Christian theology and the reason why so many do not believe. Ever since Voltaire in Candide mocked Leibnitz’ view that our world is “the best of all possible worlds”; ever since David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Enlightenment attitudes to the issue of God and evil have prevailed. Hume wrote what has become the standard version, stock-in-trade among modern theologians: If God would like to prevent evil but cannot, then he is not omnipotent; if he could but won’t, then he is malevolent. In either case he is not God.

The first thing to be said about this standard objection is that it is a rationalistic, anthropocentric perspective: the “enlightened” mind of man presuming to evaluate God. As such, it is a non-starter because, if God is God (and he should not be worshipped if he isn’t) then he is transcendent and his nature is beyond the scope of man’s natural, limited mind.

The true theological answer to this so called “problem of evil” is not anthropocentric but theocentric. In other words, only God can answer it. And in The Book of Job – out of the whirlwind – God does answer it: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel without knowledge? Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook?” Job is put firmly in his place for his presumption.

So where does this leave the problem of evil? Does God’s answer to Job amount to his saying, “Keep your nose out! I’ll do as I damn well like because I’m the boss”? No, because in another place in the Bible Genesis God says, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eastest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” This means that the mystery of the origin of evil is inextricably tied up with the mystery of the being of God: depths which we cannot plumb.

This is unsatisfactory. Happily, God provides more information and this information takes the form of the whole of subsequent Judeao-Christian history and development. It is like this…

Evil is not merely something nasty which afflicts us – an offence as it were to the self-esteem of Enlightenment Man. Evil is something which we perpetrate – by proving ourselves incapable of keeping God’s commandments. The next bit of information provided by God is God’s coming to do something about this problem in Jesus Christ who dies in order to redeem us. This is even more astonishing as a cosmic event than it appears, for it entails the truth that – God, being God and therefore omniscient, knew that his original act of creation would result in the crucifixion of the Second Person of the Trinity. Thus in the original act of creation, God willed his own suffering and death. That is he too became the victim of evil.

It is at this point in the story that Enlightenment Man pops up again and says, “Then in that case, it would have been better not to create anything at all than to do so in the sure and certain knowledge that it would entail all this misery.”

But that is the one thing precisely which we cannot know, which we are forbidden to ask about in the story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This however is not unsatisfactory; it is no cop-out on God’s part, God throwing his weight around. For the subsequent revelation of God in Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Ghost explains and vindicates the original act of creation. That is why our sin, Original Sin, has been called felix culpa – the happy fault without which God would not have become incarnate in Jesus Christ.

Evil remains a mystery, the mystery. But now we can see that it was necessary in order that God could manifest his love for us. That is why evil is necessary. If there had been some other way, God would have chosen that instead. But there you have it – the paradox of the cross: in order for the redemptive act of God to become real for us, evil is necessary. This redemptive act of love is real for us – because Christians for 2000 years have known it as a fact of their direct experience.

So the question is not, “How can a God of love allow evil?” Rather the answer is that it is evil which reveals that God is a God of love. It is not only a mystery, but a miracle. C.H. Sisson puts it beautifully, heartbreakingly, “The wonder is that he came here at all, where no one ever came voluntarily before.”

22 Feb

A Better Class of Bishop

For all their ganging up with the underclass against the government’s attempts to shake these people out of their idleness and the debilitating cycle of dependency in which this keeps them, the English bishops are careful not to get too close to the lumpen proletariat. I’ve never seen a bishop in the bookie’s for instance. If they go to the pub, it’s in the form of a ceremonial visit – never to huddle with mates in the corner over a game of dominoes or the racing paper. How many bishops can actually boast of owning a savage dog? Have you ever seen a bishop smoking – a fag, I mean? I don’t know any bishop who can roll his own, let alone one who likes the occasional joint or does a line of Charlie. They only watch snippets of downmarket telly for long enough to intrude a clunking reference to, say, Strictly Come Dancing in a sermon.

I suppose we should be thankful that the right reverend gentlemen – soon to be augmented by right reverend ladies who, we may be sure, will not resemble ladettes – adjure the yobbish lifestyle. But the effete, suburban style of life they do assume is scarcely better. I bet their kids say “toilet.” Time was when bishops were princes of the church and behaved like it. Bring back the palaces, the grand balls and reception; the riding to hounds and a dash of purple visible on the grouse moor. People like class, the grand manner and the patrician mode. These guys are supposed to be our fathers-in-God after all.

It’s years since a bishop invited me to kiss his ring. But then…

17 Feb

The plague of immoderate rain and waters

Prayers published by the Church of England for deliverance from the floods are, well…wet. Here’s one:

“God of all goodness and love,

in whom we can trust in every time of need:

be close to all who live in fear and distress

at this time of flooding in our land.

We pray for wisdom and strength for all who seek to help,

and that through this emergency,

people and communities may be drawn more closely together

in service to one another;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This is yet another example of the church’s recently-acquired fondness for doggerel words in corny rhythms. I say recently, but it dates back at least as far as that simpering excrescence The Alternative Service Book (1980) – a book, incidentally, trumpeted by the General Synod as “the greatest publishing event in 400 years”; only to ban it its use a mere twenty years later. Does the so liberal Church of England really – like the Nazis – go in for banning books? Yes indeed it does. But why? Because, they wanted to make as much money as possible out of the even worse book which they launched in 2000 – a thing called Common Worship. But back to that doggerel and those rhythms…

The rhythm of that first line echoes a sort of Noddy speech first encountered in the vain-glorious Gloria from that ASB:

“Glory to God in the highest.” The next line clumps along in the same metre, “and peace to his people on earth”

Diddly-diddly-dee-dee. Dee diddle-de-diddle-dee-dee. Here come the floods and the response of church poets is to go back to the playgroup. Par for the course, for all the modern services are infantilised, sentimentalised and euphemised. They are also disrespectful to God and peremptory. Notice how the one I’ve just quoted begins baldly, “God…” Not “Almighty God…” Certainly nothing so Prayer-Bookish and majestic as “God of all power and might…” They don’t like language like that: too elitist, imperialistic, hierarchical and not democratic at all. How reactionary to suggest that God is so much higher up the scale than us! Why, it smacks of feudalism…

It goes without saying that the theology of this prayer is weak to the point of being non-existent. In fact it is not theology at all, but naturalism. The foods just happen and God has no part in what is going on. There is no “plague of immoderate rain and waters” as The Book of Common Prayer majestically puts it. No plague at all: merely an “emergency.” – like running out of cigarettes at two o’clock in the morning. The prayer does not have the courage and faith to ask God to deliver us from the floods but only to form in us a queasy combination of the stoical and the touchy-feely. We shudder at that “may be drawn more closely together.”

Compare what the BCP has to say on the subject:

“O Almighty Lord God…” (That’s more like it!) “…who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again: we humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory…”

The new prayer is not written for a world where God is in charge: judging, punishing and delivering. Instead we are merely the pagan victims of a natural order, trying our best to work up in ourselves as much sentimental togetherness as we can muster. It is therefore a faithless prayer. But what should we expect from a faithless church?

15 Feb

Are the gates of hell prevailing?

“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” So said Jesus to Simon Peter at Caesarea Philippi in response to Simon’s recognising him as the Messiah or Christ.

We can surely trust Our Lord’s promise, but we have to be under no illusions as to its meaning. Christ’s promise was that he would not leave himself without witnesses, not that he would hasten to preserve the shambles of, for instance, the modern Church of England. Many times over the 2000 years of its history, the Christian church has failed its Founder and gone wildly wrong. But the church persists and now there are more Christians in the world than there have ever been. Christianity is particularly strong in sub-Saharan Africa and is increasing in China. Thanks very largely to a Pentecostal revival in Central and South America, the faith is thriving there too, where a strong Protestant ethic is lifting men out of crime and drug-taking and women out of prostitution: thus alleviating poverty – not by so called “liberation theology,” which is only a form of Marxism, but by traditional Christian morality.

But in Europe, whose missionaries evangelised the world, Christianity is in poor shape. the Christian faith created Europe, built its churches and great cathedrals, its hospitals and universities; established the virtue of charity as the foundation of social and commercial life through the trades guilds and livery companies, each of which is dedicated to one of the saints. This faith created a decent set of political liberties, penetrated every social institution, dominated art, literature and music for a thousand years. But now our political masters throughout the continent strive by every means to obliterate Christianity from the public realm and there has emerged a new ethics and a new politics based on the secular, atheistic notions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: liberty, equality, diversity, relativism and political-correctness. Since this new ethics denies the ancient concept of Original Sin and therefore produces a false definition of the human character based on the illusory dogma of progress, the political and social ethics of Europe is correctly described as a heresy.

It may be that Christianity will be, if not obliterated in Europe then diminished to a degree that renders it ineffectual, removed from the hearts and minds of huge populations. This secularising process is being assisted by the bishops, the clergy, the synods and councils and the whole apparatus of church governance. The Latin Bible, King James Bible and Luther’s Bible have been ditched and replaced by inferior modern versions. Churches have been re-ordered so that the priest now faces the people when he is speaking to God: thus the visual presentation of transcendence has been debased into a cosy, inwards-looking circle of the likeminded. Traditional liturgies have been discarded and replaced by doggerel forms which reflect the social gospel and the progressivist outlook. (No mention of sin or repentance, for example, in the new Anglican Baptism Service). The doctrines of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Miracles have been “demythologised” so that what meaning they retain is only as metaphors for socialism.

Well might Jesus have asked whether the returning Son of Man would find faith on earth. Yes, but not much of it in Europe.

So what can the traditional Christian do? What he must do is pray, repent of the secularising apostasy and ask God to destroy it. Today’s Christians must emulate the desert fathers who escaped degeneracy in their time by retreating to the wilderness where they set up new forms of community. There are no physical deserts available in Europe today, but we can draw ourselves apart by forming strong links with one another by means of modern technology and communications systems: in effect electronic parishes with their website magazines, traditional theological teaching by Google. And we should copy St Augustine (who fought the Pelagians and the Manichees) and St Dominic who, armed with the Rosary, waged intellectual and spiritual warfare on the Albigensian heresy.

Likewise, the calling of the traditional Christian today is to exactly the same spiritual and intellectual warfare. We shall need to use guerrilla tactics and subversion. Nor shall my sword…

For the truth is that what passes for civilisation in Europe today is a heresy at least as demonic as any of the old ones. We can take comfort from the fact that missionaries from the continent we evangelised are now returning to preach repentance and renewal, faith and morals, to our decadent society and debauched culture. Naturally, these missionaries are despised by secular European hierarchies, bien pensant practitioners of the secular Enlightenment.

So what? We were told to rejoice when persecuted. Only nowadays the persecution comes from a rotten core and it is self-inflicted.

Brethren, pray with me that God will deliver us from this body of death, that he will give us the courage, the devotion. the inventiveness and the means to cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light. As the old revivalists used to sing, Come and join us!

13 Feb

Some integrities are more equal than others

Many a good book has been produced as an act of retaliation. For instance, Newman’s magnificent Apologia Pro Vita Sua was provoked by a jibe from Charles Kingsley to the effect that truth didn’t matter to Roman Catholic clergy and moreover they were proud of the fact. I am feeling a bit Kingsleyesque myself as I read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s address to the General Synod in which he said that “inconsistency and incoherence” among members of the Church of England is no bad thing. Well, I have long thought that incoherence and inconsistency are hallmarks of the Anglican hierarchy, but I hardly imagined I would live long enough to hear an Archbishop actually recommend these qualities.

On second thoughts though, what Justin Welby said is rather like the creative device of the “two integrities” ingeniously invented by Archbishop John Habgood back in 1992. By creating flying bishops, this allowed those who opposed the ordination of women equal right – guaranteed by statute – to their view with those who supported women priests

But in what fit of partisan spite does the Synod now decree that the statutory guarantee of their right, and thus their integrity, be withdrawn from the opponents of the appointment of women bishops while it remains extended to supporters of females in the episcopacy? For this is exactly the shameful action perpetrated by the biased Synod this week.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Four legs good; two legs bad

13 Feb

Coup d’Eglise

The fraudulent bandwagon of Church of England governance rolls relentlessly on. This week the General Synod agreed to fast-track the process which will lead to the appointment of women bishops by the end of the year. Under the agreed measures – which won overwhelming support at the last synod meeting three months ago – female bishops will be introduced with a house of bishops “declaration” setting out guidance for parishes where congregations reject female episcopal oversight. The plans will see the creation of an ombudsman who, appointed by the archbishops and with the backing of lay and clergy representatives in the Synod, will rule on disputes once female bishops are appointed. Clergy who fail to co-operate with the ombudsman could be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Thus the Act of Synod of 1993, the benign inspiration of John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, which guaranteed by statute a permanent place in the church for those who conscientiously oppose the ordination of women, will be rescinded.

Opponents will no longer have this statutory safeguard. The so-called “flying bishops” appointed to provide their pastoral oversight will be no more. Traditionalists will in effect have to rely on the generosity, goodwill and fair-mindedness of the feminists: and we have bitter experience of just how short a way that will take us.

The reality is that the liberal takeover of the Church of England is now complete. In this context “liberal” is the most misused word in the ecclesiological lexicon, for our liberal mistresses and masters exercise liberality only to those with whom they agree. For “liberal” read “totalitarian leftism.” They hate traditional Evangelicals and Anglocatholics, seeing them as throwbacks to an unenlightened era before the feminisation and diversification of the church took place. In his last speech before his retirement, Rowan Williams said all there is to say about the future shape of the church when he declared that we have a lot of catching up to do with the mores of secular society. As if Jesus Christ had commanded, “Go ye into all the world and set up focus groups.”

Well this week’s vote has seen to it that Rowan Williams’ prescribed catching-up has been achieved. The character of the church has been irreversibly changed. In Gertrud Himmelfarb’s memorable phrase: “The counter-culture is the culture now.” And traditionalists can expect no charity from the new regime.

What does all this presage for the future of the church? We can see pretty clearly what this future will be because we have a precedent in the development – I should say decline and fall – of the Episcopal Church of the United States which has adopted all the secular social fads of the the age with the result that that once great institution is now a laughing stock, a caricature of political correctness, with collapsed attendances and the complete loss of its influence in the nation.

Like ECUSA, the Church of England has become a right-on secular sect: its liturgy long since destroyed, its Authorised Version of the Bible cast contemptuously cast aside, its theology demythologised and its pastoralia debased into a form of practical socialism.

At least they should have had the decency to end this week’s synodical proceedings with a Requiem for the C.of E.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: Church of England