One in 50 Anglican clergy in the UK believes God is merely a human construct, according to a new survey today.
Just eight in ten believe there is a personal God and a further three in 100 believe there is some spirit or life force.
And in spite of two millennia of Church doctrine based on determining the mind of God through the Scriptures, nearly one in ten believes: “No-one can know what God is like.”
While this does not surprise me (I know plenty of clergy like this in liberal protestant circles), I have never for the life of me understood why people who don’t believe in God put up with ordained ministry. Ordained ministry about killed me, and I believe in a personal God. I can’t imagine going through the motions of ordained ministry and not really believe any of this stuff, not to mention my own personal intellectual integrity.
I at first didn’t believe the stats – only 1 in 50 Church of England clergy doesn’t believe God exists??
But the next stat put it in perspective – 20% don’t believe in a personal God. That puts me on one side of a huge divide and those 20% on the other side together with the atheists: The God of the Bible in whom I believe is personal. He is all-powerful, holy and righteous, but He is also a person. He speaks to us, and makes demands of us, and He came to this earth to pay the penalty for us.
As Francis Schaeffer so aptly put it, “He is there and He is not silent”.