|
Church’s
end
Is the Church of
England as we know it coming to an end?
Atheist readers may not care one way or the
other, but, while it has influence, and
while a conservative Reform movement is
holding some of the purse strings, should we
worry?
Neil Richardson is part of the C of
E, an institution he says is “tolerant and
easygoing” – and he doesn’t want it to
change.
During the course of the
past decade, and even further back, there
were rumblings of a fatal collision between
liberal reformers in the Church of England
and the worldwide Anglican Communion on the
one hand and, on the other, the more
conservative forces assembled under the
grouping within the church of England that
is known as Reform and was established in
1993.
Reform is a movement
dedicated to turning over the Church of
England as an umbrella organisation.
After the fiasco in 2003
of the appointment and withdrawal of the
openly gay Jeffrey John as Bishop of
Reading, I was asking the question: Can the
Church of England survive much longer in its
present state? It seemed likely that, in the
course of the next few months, there would
be severe challenges to the Church of
England that may well have seen it break up
into two or three fragments. The situation
that may provoke this result is complex and
has a long history, but is possibly very
imminent. (Although the prophets of doom
have been proved wrong in the past . . .)
It is difficult to
pinpoint the start of the process that has
led to today’s problems. Some might argue
that the seeds of the Church of England’s
potential demise were sown in its initial
conception. I guess nobody at the time
thought it would last 400-plus years. It was
always a makeshift compromise, designed to
keep together theological views that are, at
root, incompatible. The incompatibilities
are now staring at each other. They see that
the end is in sight. The only question would
appear to be who will survive in best shape
when and if we finally part company?
|
 |
|
Dr Jeffrey John,
Dean of St Albans |
If we look back for signs
of today’s situation, we may point to the
19th century and the well-documented
alternatives to the biblical version of
reality that surfaced in that century. There
was the publication of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the
public attempt by a Bishop of Oxford to
argue down by ridicule the theories it
presented. There was the work of Sigmund
Freud, which uncovered areas of human life
hitherto only glimpsed at, and the political
philosophy of Karl Marx, which reduced the
churches to an opiate of the people.
One by one, they came
forward to demolish one or more
long-established tenets of the Bible, and,
as we know, the 20th century saw the gradual
demise of the Church’s teaching and the
total victory of modern thinking as the norm
for ordinary people. The people voted with
their feet, and now only a tiny percentage
of the population find themselves in a
Church of England church, or any church, on
a Sunday.
Unusual
phenomenon
In more recent times, the
two appalling wars of the bloody 20th
century knocked a lot of faith out of the
nation and the rise of scientific
explanations for life saw the end of a
biblical interpretation of life for the vast
majority of people. In the universities,
even theologians were having doubts and were
reinterpreting the Bible in the light of
modern thinking and secular ideas.
But the 20th century saw
an unusual phenomenon. It was understandable
that university thinkers and theologians
might be reflecting radically on the Bible,
and outsiders might attack the church, but
then senior Church figures came out and
seemed to be casting doubt on the Church’s
doctrines. A good example is the
popularising Honest to God, a book
written by a Bishop of Woolwich, which
presented to the popular reader a selection
of ideas critical of the traditional
theology of the Bible and apparently
undermining it.
There were some strange
anomalies. The Rev. Don Cupitt was writing
about the death of God and atheistic
Christianity, while at the same time drawing
a stipend as a C of E cleric and celebrating
Holy Communion in parish churches. In 1977,
Maurice Wiles, then the Regius Professor of
Divinity at Oxford, contributed to a book
called The Myth of God Incarnate.
The book was an
intellectual exercise designed to understand
how the Church could re-present the
Christian claims about incarnation in a
language and thought pattern that was
understandable to modern people who had lost
faith in the original language and
thought patterns of the Bible. He was widely
abused for this brave effort.
Uproar of
opposition
Then, in 1984, a scholar
and academic was appointed Bishop of Durham.
His name was David Jenkins. He made some
public pronouncements that appeared to
indicate that he, a bishop, did not believe
literally in the virgin birth or
resurrection of Jesus. He caused an uproar
of opposition and, oddly, part of York
Minster burned down just as he was to be
consecrated bishop.
|
 |
|
David Jenkins,
former Bishop of Durham |
All these goings-on in
the Church of England were watched with
mirth by the media, with sadness by our
friends and with glee by our detractors.
Within the Church, a group of evangelical
Christians were watching with a growing
sense of horror. After preliminary
discussions, they met in 1993 in London and
created a new grouping within the Church,
which was given the name Reform. Reform is
now a large and powerful grouping of
evangelical congregations from all round the
country and it is the largest-growing part
of the Church of England.
For this reason and
because it teaches tithing of incomes for
congregations, Reform churches have lots of
money. In fact, it has been said that,
without the money these churches plough into
the Church of England’s diocesan structures,
the C of E would fold up.
That is where we are
possibly approaching.
Reform argues that we are
in need of reform because we have strayed
from biblical teaching and started to talk
like secular and liberal people of our own
time, rather than keep to the faith. It
stoutly holds to the Bible as having supreme
authority in all matters and it identifies
the major areas as:
-
doctrinal purity on
matters such as the virgin birth and the
resurrection and the finality of
revelation in Jesus Christ;
-
sexual ethics, in
particular, opposition to homosexuality
and all sex outside marriage; and
-
theological
objections to women having charge of
churches.
Reform people argue that
the current liberal catholic leadership of
the C of E is contradicting the teaching of
the Bible by:
-
permitting the
questioning of such matters as the
virgin birth and accepting the validity
and integrity of other faiths;
-
accepting homosexual
relations as good – and what a strange
coincidence that another Bishop of
Oxford should now have triggered the
furore about Jeffrey John!; and
-
giving women priests
authority over men and moving towards
women bishops.
But the crunch for Reform
members is that they do not want to spend
their money supporting Christians who are
deeply undermining what they believe is the
true Bible message. So, as the crunch time
comes, there is a head of steam in Reform
for them to withdraw their money or at least
cap their contributions to the central
church funds and use their spending power to
support only those church congregations who
are of the same mind.
That is where we may be
heading, and, if it does come to that, we in
the other parts of the Church of England
will be feeling the financial pinch
immediately and there will be difficult and
life-changing decisions for all of us to
make. It may not happen, but I feel that,
this time, the Church of England will
unravel into its constituent parts and we
will be looking around us for inspiration.
The whim of a king
Well, despite what I have
been describing above, I am still a believer
in the Church of England and I am very proud
to be part of it. It is broken in places.
Human weaknesses are abundant and obvious.
It is irritating and often as slow as a
dinosaur. But would you want it any other
way?
The Church of England may
have been born in blood and at the whim of a
king but it slowly evolved into an
expression of faith that is uniquely English
and tolerant of differences. That is the way
I found it and that is the way I want to
leave it. I don’t want a Church of England
that is cocky and assertive and I don’t want
a Church of England that lionises a supreme
leader or worships the Bible. I want a
Church of England that is an open and
accepting place for everyone who seeks it
and needs it.
It feels to me that the
current tensions are largely due to what,
for want of a better term, we might call “entryism”.
The position is similar to that in which the
Labour Party found itself in the 1970s, when
people of an extreme political persuasion
joined to steer it in the direction of the
far left. People who do not have the
character and temperament to be C of E have
been entering the church and are now in
positions that permit their extreme views to
create division, whereas hitherto we have
lived side by side under the C of E
umbrella. Is it now showing more tolerant
followers the digitus impudicus – or,
in other words,
flipping the bird?
|
 |
The tolerant and
easygoing C of E is where I grew up and
discovered myself as a young person. It has
served the nation well for hundreds of years
and it because it hasn’t been too pushy or
arrogant, it has witnessed to the God of
love who is beyond our grasp to control.
Some of the Reform people seem to think that
God is their glove puppet and they can make
him say or do whatever they want him to say
or do. We must resist these people. Being a
tolerant and liberal Christian may not be
fashionable any more, but it is worth
defending ourselves against attack and being
changed into an authoritarian or
Bible-blinded church.
“Above all,” wrote David
Jenkins, “we need to pray . . . that God
will . . . spare us the ultimate
humiliation . . . of discussing him in ways
which deny his mystery, his freedom, his
infinite openness and his incredibly
suffering love.”
Neil
Richardson has been the rector of the
Parish of Greenford Magna in
Middlesex since 1982. He is also a
Prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral and an
Honorary Alderman of the London Borough of
Ealing. He has been a member of the
Lesbian and
Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) since the
1970s.
|
