As the BBC reports, some church leaders in the Netherlands want to transform their small nation into a laboratory for rethinking Christianity ”” “experimenting with radical new ways of understanding the faith.”
Religious Affairs Correspondent Robert Pigott tells of Rev. Klaas Hendrikse, a minister of the PKN, the mainstream Protestant denomination in the Netherlands. Pastor Hendrikse doesn’t believe in life after death, nor even in God as a supernatural being. He told the BBC that he has “no talent” for believing historic and orthodox doctrines. “God is not a being at all,” he says, but just an experience.
Furthermore, as Pigott reports, “Mr. Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.”
[blockquote]One layperson cited in the report celebrated the liberation of Christianity from truth claims, allowing her to recreate the faith “to my own way of thinking, my own way of doing.â€[/blockquote] Ah yes, the Church of the “Holy Trinity”: me, myself and I. Sadly, this woman has no understanding of religion at all – any religion let alone the True Faith. She is to busy with herself to see anything outside her thinking and experiance. It is the pinnacle of fossilized thinking.
If these non-believing ministers had any integrity they would quit the ministry and join some other profession or trade. But, I suppose it is easier to keep cashing the paychecks non-Christian “Christian” clergy are able to reel in from the approving secular publishing world or the rubes that keep them on a parish payroll.
Rome has had its trouble with Dutch Catholic semi-believers. A few decades ago Rome got the so-called “Dutch Catechism” revised to make it more orthodox Catholic.