Dear Bill,
There is an old joke about being so broad minded that your brains fall out. It seems to me that the Anglican Church suffers from a similar problem. Because it plays host to everybody from wannabe Baptists to Anglo Catholics who want to be more Catholic than the Pope, it can't say, "This is what we believe," without upsetting one group or another. Consequently it ends up with no theology in particular. Even belief in God can be an optional extra, and that's amongst the clergy - not just the laity. The Thirty Nine Articles are shut away in the broom cupboard, like a slightly senile maiden aunt everybody is a bit embarrassed of.
In the political sphere, it would be like a political party which included everybody fom left wing Marxists to right wing Tories, and, come election time, they find it impossible to write a manifesto without one faction or another threatening to break away.
Probably the Anglican Church is the ideal church for somebody new to Christianity, and who is him/herself none too sure of what they believe.
L
Good to hear from you . . . well, this is pretty much a common feature of all "national" churches, and certainly a similar point could be made from within, say the Lutheran churches of the Nordic nations - or even the German Lutherans, since those attending the big eucharist we went to at the 1999 Kirchentag and those demonstrating outside against the Godless liberalism of us inside were, as I understand it, technically members of the same church. But it all seems rather silly to me. Faith is about engaging with mystery, and as we try to do that we shall have different experiences and different personal pictures of what that mystery might be. Of course there have to be limits and some consonance of belief (hence the need for corporate worship and prayer, and some kind of structure . . . and, maybe, to get the 39 articles out of the broom cupboard, dust them off, and use them carefully and - more to the point - caringly), but within those limits we need to be free to see things in a different way from our co-religionists without falling out. Sad that we often can't manage this; once we start erecting huge great doctrinal walls, from which we shower our rivals with flaming arrows, we are in fact believing something that is too small to be the truth. My image of God isn't God, God is always more than anything I can manage to fix my poor brain on. The nearest I can get to the truth is to say, with Paul, that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself". And maybe therefore to then say to the rest of the CofE, whether they be swinging thuribles or waving their copies of Mission Praise, that the Jesus of the Gospels is where we begin, and all else is to be read and understood in the light that he gives us, and with forbearance and love. Funny, though, that for all my own doubts about Anglicanism, so that sometimes other denominations look much more tempting and at others I wonder whether really I am a "post-Church believer", the Anglican Church still feels like the best boat from which to fish - for me, anyway.
Back out into the sunshine now . . .
Bill
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