…this obsession with things which are ”˜less than God’ is rooted in a more profound malaise ”“ the House of Bishops is not spiritually serious. By this I mean to say that they don’t seem to believe that the substance of Christianity is a matter of eternal life and death. The House of Bishops seems to be filled with just the same sort of social justice pleading that a liberal atheist would be perfectly at home with, with the consequence that the Bishops sound just like every other well-meaning middle class worrier….
The Bishops, in other words, seem to embody the cultural cringe that most Christians in England suffer from ”“ that feeling when you are a reasonably intelligent and committed believer, but in mixed company refrain from mentioning anything to do with Christian faith for fear of causing offence, or, worse, being mistaken for a fundamentalist. The trouble is that the Bishops are there precisely to articulate the Christian faith in the public sphere and ”“ surely! ”“ to run the risk of offending when they do.
What the Bishops have failed to do is articulate a coherent narrative, not about what Christianity is in general and as a whole, but what Christianity means for the English people at this point in our national life.
Read it all (emphasis mine).
Thanks for the link to this article.
Mr Norton’s last paragraph encapsulates the systemic problem which the Church of England has. He notes that the CofE needs prophetic leaders who see Christianity as of primary importance for Britain, but that:
“Such a person could never get through the selection process to become a Bishop of course. Such is the nature of the problem we face.”
I think there is a problem here: What the Bishops have failed to do is articulate a coherent narrative, not about what Christianity is in general and as a whole, but what Christianity means for the English people at this point in our national life.
But what does it mean to be English? A large part of the population of multi-cultural London, for example, I would say feels British but not quite English. There is reference also here to the English nation. In the past there was a sense of the Church of England articulating the values of the English nation: the C of E epitomised the English virtues of tolerance, decency, duty, steadfastness, all of them interpreted in the light of our faith in Jesus Christ. Perhaps allied to a certain reticence.
Now we are a more complex people in many ways, and the sense of a state church as our default religious setting does not make sense in the way that it used to do. Perhaps the choice is, after all, as Martyn Percy discerned it – between a state church/folk religion on the one hand, and a more Christ-centred, evangelistic and doctrinally certain church on the other. In the latter case, it is the corps of faith and mission that holds the members, not a birthright or attempt to be all things to all people.