From here:
Lord Blair, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, will say rebelling against the status quo is “triumphantly admirable”, in a speech for Lent to be broadcast on Radio 4 this week.
The practising Anglican emphasises conflict as an “essential part of natural and human progress”.
Anglicans are testing this theory so enthusiastically that, in the West, they have almost progressed to the state of non-existence.
How on earth do you find these interesting nuggets of Anglican thought?????
One comment. Anglican laypersons have more freedom of thought than we clergy. A layperson can have quite batty ideas, about God, Jesus, Church, etc. And yet, that person may be a faithful, good person in his living. We clergy, though, are expected to have some consistency between our thinking, our expressed beliefs, with our living. And, as clergy, while we can think our own thoughts, and individually we each may have a quirky belief here or there,(and even have a few doubts about orthodox beliefs) we each are to strive to express a representative faith, or “the Church’s Faith”. A clergyman trys to express an intelligent Faith to encourage the laity in their living, and to honour God’s name as present in Church worship.
As a priest, then, I try not to express my doubts in the pulpit. But, with fellow clergy friends, in the rough and tumble of a Bible Study, then intellectual debate is fair game.
Lord Blair isn’t a theologian, so his clumbsy thinking isn’t a danger to the Church. But, if a Canadian Bishop were to say: conflict and struggle is good…one would want to know what context he is thinking of.
The concept of “progress” is a problematic concept in modern Anglicanism. Because we have false prophets and false activists in the Church, who believe themselves to be progressive and thus superior to other Anglicans (like traditionalists, evangelists, anyone who quotes scriptures, etc.), we have the sin of religious pride, rampant in our Church. It is impossible to debate or reason with these religious sinners. And some of these false activists are clergy, and some are Bishops.
Generally speaking, some conflict is okay, is healthy. But too much conflict wears a person down, leads to cynicism, and results in people leaving the Church. The Church is not, in it’s essence, a debating society.
Tireless research.
As for whether the laity or clergy are more prone to battiness, I confess, even before I attended GS2010, I was of the opinion that the battiness of the clergy – present company excepted, of course – frequently exceeded that of the laity both in inventiveness and the authority with which it tends to be delivered. I interviewed the principal of Wycliffe, George Sumner, at synod and toyed with the thought of asking him if there was a special course in daft thinking in some seminaries.
I remember Malcolm Muggeridge writing of a former archbishop of Canterbury – Ramsey, I think – attending Jesus Christ Superstar and jumping up afterwards with the exclamation “God is Great”. In those days it didn’t have the connotations that it does today – Ramsey was not wearing a suicide vest; Muggeridge’s point was not the banal tautology of the comment but that something as trite as JCS should have provoked it.
I dearly wish Muggeridge were alive today to witness the antics of Rowan Williams, who appears to have reached – through diligent study, no doubt – the apogee in Anglican buffoonery with his “sharia law might be good for Britain” pronouncement, his induction as a Druid and his potty Hegelian meandering from one side of an issue to another.
Like Muggeridge, I don’t believe in progress; Anglican progress, in particular, is an oxymoron.