Showing posts with label Church of England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Church of England. Show all posts

Friday 25 April 2014

Christianity to be enshrined

In a letter to The Telegraph, eight leading thinkers including Prof Roger Scruton, the philosopher and writer, insist that the moderate brand of Christianity “enshrined” in the British constitution actively protects those of other faiths and none.
The letter was published as Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, who is himself an atheist, said it was “flamingly obvious” that Britain is founded on Christian values.

in the course of a 90 second talk had used the words "Britain's Christian traditions". It was enough to get him excluded by a particular member of the BBC's thought police. One wonders if the Prime Minister, David Cameron will be allowed to say his latest remarks on the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Many object to the British Prime Minister his characterisation of Britain as a “Christian country” and the negative consequences for politics and society that this engenders.

"In his call for more evangelism, Mr Cameron is exclusively tying himself to one faith group, inevitably to the exclusion of others," opined Elizabeth O'Casey, Policy and Research Office at the National Secular Society. She also warned the British people that we are moving away from the concept of all of us being "rights-bearing citizens first and foremost, with democratic autonomy and equality, regardless of which faith they happen to have, or not have".

At a social level, Britain has been shaped like many other European countries for the better by many pre-Christian, non-Christian, and post-Christian forces. They are a plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives. To call it religious is taking the religious element out of proportion. I do know many call Belgium also a Catholic country, but if you would question the citicens about their beliefs, wou would get a total different opinion. They mix Catholic and Christian as if it is the same, because they do not know the diffenrence and most of them do not know what Catholicisim enhales.

Most citicens donot want to recognise they have gone far away form religion and certainly far away for m the reall Christian and Jewish values.

The inhabitants of the West European countries should come to realize that they are a largely non-religious society.

I would agree with more than 55 signatories:
Constantly to claim otherwise fosters alienation and division in our society. Although it is right to recognise the contribution made by many Christians to social action, it is wrong to try to exceptionalise their contribution when it is equalled by British people of different beliefs. This needlessly fuels enervating sectarian debates that are by and large absent from the lives of most British people, who do not want religions or religious identities to be actively prioritised by their elected government.
Gavin Littaur reacts also:
David Cameron should be more careful when pontificating about Christianity, given that he does not speak for those (such as myself, a Jew), who are not necessarily of his faith and beliefs.
The Prime Minister’s urging of Britons to be “more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there” is particularly unfortunate. It is at best tactless and at worst an exemplification of the zealous proselytising of extremists.
The commentator finds the letter against David Cameron just the latest expression of an infantile multi-culturalism that has done terrible damage to social cohesion precisely because it is too weak to create any substantial bonds of identity.
The Church of England is the established church and the Queen is the head of it for reasons which are deeply bound up with the country's political, religious and cultural inheritance.
Neither does the fact that most people don't nowadays go to church on a Sunday mean that Christian values and symbols do not play a vital role in national life. Whenever there's a national tragedy -- the death of Diana for example -- watch how quickly Christianity moves back into centre stage.
says The commentator.

As in Belgium the Catholic church may be the main church, the Church of England is the established church in England, but that does not mean that most British citizens would adhere to that church or believe in the God of that church.
It is not because when we go from place to place, where we may find everywhere in any town or village across the country a local church, that we may find religious people coming to that church aor that it is functional or not. It tells more about the past than about the present. In most countries those village churches are most of the time empty buildings.

More than anything else the church buildings may define the local landscape and the visual community of which we are all a part, but that does not tell us that they and we are from the same religious community, nor believing in the same things.


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Thursday 13 February 2014

19° century Londoners, religion and heretical opinions

J. Ewing Ritchie, author ofbritish senators,” “the night side of london,” etc., wrote in his book the Religious Life Of London in 1870 that man is undoubtedly a religious animal.  It seemed that at the time he was living in England at any rate the remark hold good.
St. Alban's, Golders Green Parish Church in Ba...
St. Alban's, Golders Green Parish Church in Barnet, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No one who ignores the religious element in our history can rightly understand what England was, or how she came to be what she is.  The fuller is our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the more minute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in all minds that religion has been for good or bad the great moving power, and, in spite of the teachings of Secularism or of Positivism, it is clear that as much as ever the questions which are daily and hourly coming to the front have in them more or less of a religious element.
The author knew it were not often foreigners who perceived this. Several foreigners mastered the English habits and ways, all that the English called their inner life; yet, to Louis Blanc for example, the English pulpit was a piece of wood — nothing more.
According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred fire has ceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; church attendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has little to recommend it.  There is beauty in desolation — in life changing into death —
“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;”

English: Logo of the Church of England
Logo of the Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Not even of this beauty could the Church of England boast.  Dr. Döllinger — a more thoughtful, a more learned, a more laborious writer — was not more flattering, according to Ritchie.

The Church of England, he tells us, is “the Church only of a fragment of the nation,” of “the rich, cultivated, and fashionable classes.”  It teaches “the religion of deportment, of gentility, of clerical reserve.”  “In its stiff and narrow organization, and all want of pastoral elasticity, it feels itself powerless against the masses.”
In the 19° century London the patronage was mostly in the hands of the nobility and gentry, who regarded it as a means of provision for their younger sons, sons-in-law, and cousins.
Our latest critic, M. Esquiros, writes in a more favourable strain, yet even he confesses how the city operative shuns what he deems the Church of Mammon, and draws a picture of the English clergyman, by no means suggestive of zeal in the Master’s service or readiness to bear His yoke.  Dissent foreigners generally ignore, yet Dissent is as active, as energetic as the State Church, and may claim that it has practically realized the question of our time—the Free Church in the Free State.
Life to most of the people living in the 19°century Britain was hard, and it would have been harder still
 if after a day’s toil Paterfamilias had to discuss the three births of Christ, or His twofold nature, the Æons of the Gnostics, the Judaism of the Ebionites, the ancient Persian dualism which formed the fundamental idea of the system of Manes, or the windy frenzy of Montanus, with an illogical wife, a friend gifted with a fatal flow of words, or a pert and shallow child.  We like those with whom we constantly associate.  They are wise men and sound Christians.  They are those who fast and pay tithes, and are eminently proper and respectable.  As to the heretics—the publicans and sinners, away with them.  Let their portion be shame in this life, perdition in the next.  Thus it is heretics have got a bad name.  Church history has been written by their enemies, by men who have honestly believed that a man of a different heresy to their own would rob an orphan, and break all the commandments.
The Rev. Mr. Thwackem “doubted not but all the infidels and heretics in the world would, if they could, confine honour to their own absurd errors and damnable deceptions.”

When looking at English literature of the 19° century I may think we mostly are confronted with classical Christian families, mostly belonging to the mainstream protestant churches England still has to day. The Church of England being the most common denomination.


At that time it was no different probably than today that people would easily say of others they where heretics.
Free Church of England
Free Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia)



According to the Articles of the English Establishment,
 “the Church of Christ is a company of faithful people among whom the pure Word of God is preached and the Sacraments rightly administered according to Christ’s institution.”
But on this very matter we also did find the Church divided.
Low Churchmen tell us that the ritualists do not rightly administer the Sacraments, and the latter say the same of their opponents.  The Record suggests that Bishop Colenso is little better than one of the wicked, and charitably insinuates that the late Dean Milman is amongst the lost.  Dr. Pusey places the Evangelicals in the same category with Jews, or Infidels, or Dissenters, and has strong apprehensions as to their everlasting salvation.  Dr. Temple was made Bishop of Exeter, and Archdeacon Denison set apart the day of his installation as one of humiliation and prayer.  Yet all these are of the Establishment.
I am not quite sure if there were more non-trinitarians or unitarians in the 19° century, but we can read about the attitudes taken to such beleivers.
Dr. Parr gladly associated with Unitarians, and went to Unitarian chapels to hear Unitarian ministers preach.  Would Dean Close do so?  Yet Dr. Parr, as much as Dean Close, was of the Church as regards solemn profession, and deliberate assent and consent.  Mr. Melville believes Dissent to be schism, and one of the deadly sins, while the Deans of Westminster and Canterbury hold out to Dissenters friendly hands.
When Ritchie wrote his books there were Ebionites  who regarded Christ as a mere man and Gnostics whom considered Jesus as superhuman; but in that capacity as one of a very numerous class.
The author considered the Monachians, who were divided respectively into Dynamistic and Modalistic as possible heretic.  As the latter held that the whole fulness of the Deity dwelt in Christ and only found in him a peculiar mode of manifestation, it was assumed that the natural inference was that the Father himself had died on the Cross.
Hence to these heretics the name of Patripassians was applied by the orthodox.  Sabellius, who maintained a Trinity, not of divine Persons but of successive manifestations under the names Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was one of the chief Patripassians.  The Arian controversy, as Dean Stanley shows, turned on the relations of the divine persons before the first beginning of time.
 There was also a lot of division in the many denominations.
If we take the Articles, the Church Establishment is as orthodox as the firmest Christian or the narrowest-minded bigot can desire; if we turn to its ministers, we find them as divided as it is possible for people professing to take their teaching from the Bible can be.  If there be any grace in creeds and articles, any virtue in signing them, if their imposition be not a solemn farce, it is impossible that heresy should exist within the Established Church.  It is in the wide and varied fields of Dissent that we are to look for heresy.
Though he considered the Church of England to be tolerant, to a certain extent, of heresy.  The judicious Hooker writes,
 “We must acknowledge even heretics themselves to be a maimed part, yet a part, of the visible Church.  If an infidel should pursue to death an heretic professing Christianity only for Christian profession’s sake, could we deny unto him the honour of martyrdom?  Yet this honour all men know to be proper unto the Church.  Heretics, therefore, are not utterly cast out from the visible Church of Christ.  If the Fathers do, therefore, anywhere, as often they do, make the true visible Church of Christ and heretical companies opposite, they are to be construed as separating heretics not altogether from the company of believers, but from the fellowship of sound believers.  For where professed unbelief is, there can be no visible Church of Christ; there may be where sound belief wanteth.  Infidels being clean without the Church, deny directly and utterly reject the very principles of Christianity which heretics embrace, and err only by misconstruction, whereupon their opinions, although repugnant indeed to the principles of Christian faith, are notwithstanding by them held otherwise and maintained as most consistent therewith.”
The Privy Council by its Judgment of “Essays and Reviews” has decided that a Churchman may hold heretical opinions.
In popular language, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians are orthodox; the Quakers, the Methodists, Wesleyans and otherwise, are orthodox; for our purpose popular language is sufficient.
Ritchie wrote.

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Continues with:  19° century London and Unitarians

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Wednesday 27 November 2013

Giving cogent reasons to young people why Christian faith is relevant to them

Earlier this week, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey warned that Christianity might be going extinct in the UK, maybe even in one generation’s time. When we look at the amount of people visiting churches this would not be a surprise.
English: former Archbishop of Canterbury Georg...
English: former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Also when we do look at the lifestyle and when we hear youngsters speaking we may wonder where their heart is and in how far they are still connected with the Creator of this world.

The Archbishop may be convinced that the Church is failing to attract young people to its fold and therefore should look for what reason there has come such a distance between the people and the 'church'.
 “We have to give cogent reasons to young people why the Christian faith is relevant to them.”
Bishop Carey said. His statement was echoed by another Anglican authority, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who also underlined the scale of the crisis, telling members of the Church of England’s General Synod.

We would not regret an impassioned plea for Church to adopt a new missionary stance, so it would be better if those clerks looked not so much to have their constant internal debates going on. Instead of  “rearranging furniture when the house is on fire” they would better come out in the open and take care that everybody gat assembled.

They must “evangelise or fossilise”.  It is high time many more Christians would understand we shall have to face a “re-evangelisation of England”, on a par with the ministry of the northern saints such as Cuthbert, Hilda and Aidan who spread Christianity in Anglo-Saxon times.

The former Archbishop Lord Carey his warning came as he addressed the Shropshire Light Conference at Holy Trinity Church in Shrewsbury at the weekend discussing how the church could be “re-imagined”. According to him the church is still doing much important work, but it faces an existential challenge.
“In many parts of Britain churches are struggling, some priests are diffident and lack confidence; a feeling of defeat is around.
“The burden seems heavy and joy in ministry has been replaced by a feeling of heaviness.”
He said that the reaction from the public was not so much hostile as dismissive.

“The viewpoint could be expressed in a variety of non -verbal ways: the shrug of indifference, the rolled eyes of embarrassment, the yawn of boredom.  
Do those priests stand still why so many people become bored? Why so many do not feel that they can be or are no part of the church?

It is not only the Church of England or the West European continental  countries their churches like the Roman Catholic Church that face the empty churches because those institutions have been too busy reorganising the structures, arguing over words and phrases and have lost the spirit of evangelising. Such failings mean that the Church may be in danger of losing its “nationwide presence”.


Canterbury Cathedral: West Front, Nave and Cen...
Canterbury Cathedral: West Front, Nave and Central Tower. Seen from south. Image assembled from 4 photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Years ago perhaps many people could find a church as a place where great things happened. There were many social activities going on in the parishes, which drew a crowd.  With all the comfort in the houses the church buildings did not much effort to make it comfortable for its visitors.
 “To sit in a cold church looking at the back of other peoples’ heads is surely not the best place to meet exciting people and to hear prophetic words.”
The church leaders of the Church of England are aware that
 “It is still the case that people are essentially looking for spiritual fulfilment.”
So perhaps they can start at working on this. Trying to give spiritual guidance and spiritual fulfilment to the people who are still looking for many answers in their life.
 “So many churches have no ministry to young people and that means they have no interest in the future.
“As I have repeated many times in the past we are one generation away from extinction.
“We have to give cogent reasons to young people why the Christian faith is relevant to them.” 
According to Cristina Odone, journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith, the claim of George Carey that Britain's precious Judaeo-Christian legacy is being diluted and that Christianity is one generation away from extinction is not so. She can see why he despairs for the Christians because plenty of things have been going wrong.

She writes:
 "First and foremost, our enemies are organised as never before. Secularists have made a concerted effort to erase Christianity from public life here and across the West. They have silenced prayers before meetings, the ringing of church bells, and even the girl scouts who once pledged to serve God."
But does she really believes that the ringing of bells at times when people are sleeping or doing something different will bring them to God? would it not more annoi them and get them the feeling that something is being pushed in their throat?

Odone has written in her ebook, No God Zone, that the secularists have successfully enshrined their bias against religion in laws across Europe.
"The Observatory on Intolerance against Christians in Europe has reported that EU member states have enacted 41 laws that discriminate against Christians. The effect of such legislation is huge: some professions, such as doctors, therapists and even pharmacists, are now closed to Christians, who would otherwise have to go against their conscience on issues such as abortion, euthanasia or the morning after pill."
She does find that the forces of atheism are ranged against the believers and, as George Carey points out, too many Christian clergy cannot stand up to the challenge. They are too ready to dilute their ethos – look at what has been happening with faith schools, both Anglican and Catholic. 

But before the English give up on the faith of their forefathers Odone finds that they do have to consider three new factors.
" Pope Francis, Justin Welby and the backlash effect. The extraordinary impact of Francis has been felt not only among his immediate audience – Italians, who are now retuning to Mass – but, incredibly, among the intelligentsia that is traditionally so sceptical of Christian values. Jonathan Freedland, who is neither a Christian nor a conservative, went so far as to predict that in college dorms around the globe, students will replace their posters of Che Guevara with ones of Francis. Justin Welby's impact has been more subtle, but he too has shown Christianity in a new light: inclusive, compassionate, and above all truthful. No wasting time and effort on false gods like money, celebrity, status.
Both men have struck a chord. Christians – and many non-Christians – have grown weary of the relentless pursuit of shallow goals. We have grown weary of being mocked for holding dear our heritage and its immortal values: charity, honesty, humility, and love. "Backlash" sounds too violent for a Christian response, but that is what I believe is taking root. I see it in the effort to block porn on the internet, the generous reaction to the Philippines' disaster, the distaste for bloated bankers and for OTT, twerking celebrities.

John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford and Chair of the Church of England’s Board of Education. “We don’t need to attract them to church” he declared, “they’re already there, if we embrace our church schools fully.” He  echoed the former Archbishop Rowan Williams’ declaration that “A church school is a church.” Despite being publicly-funded, state schools are seen by the church as the primary method of recruiting the next generation of Anglicans.

The Church of England considers having her evangelism in the discipline of ‘catechesis, as one of the ‘Seven Disciplines of Evangelisation’. Catechesis, described by the Church as “teaching and learning faith”, is more akin to religious instruction than religious education. According to the paper, “Catechesis of adults and children and young people is absolutely critical to the growth of the church.” The Church say it is a discipline exercised in the pulpit, in pastoral encounters, and, you guessed it, in schools.

They seem to trust that all the work can be delivered in the schools by that catechism or religion class. Though their paper asks how the place of catechesis in Church of England schools be strengthened and how they can create a task force which will “support Archbishops in taking forward the call to evangelism.”

A second Synod motion, concerning church schools, already seems to shed some light on how this will be achieved. The motion affirmed “the crucial importance of the Church of England’s engagement with schools for its contribution to the common good and to its spiritual and numerical growth.”

The motion invited dioceses to draw up plans for promoting the widest possible use of a “new online resource” for teaching Christianity, not only in Church schools, but also in non-Church schools.

Known as ‘The Christianity Project’, the resources have been developed to ensure that every child has a “life enhancing encounter with the Christian faith and the person of Jesus Christ.” The Church insist that “all children, of all faiths and none, should be offered the opportunity for a serious engagement with the Christian faith.”

According to the Church, “There is no expectation of commitment but learning about and engaging with the faith is a necessary pre-requisite for commitment especially for children and young people whose only experience of church is through the school.”

The Church of England’s clear intention here is to ramp up the evangelisation, not only in Church schools, but also in non-faith schools. They realise that the indoctrination of children, however subtle in its execution, is absolutely critical to its survival.

This results in our state education system being used by the Church to manipulate children and young people, in order to meet its own needs. For our legislators to allow this is both morally objectionable and intellectually irresponsible.

State education has become a playground for all manner of religions and denominations – and despite being one of the least religious countries in Europe, huge swathes of the English education system being under religious influence – and in the case of the Church of England, being used to prop them up.

Comments by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, recently indicate that he intends to be as accommodating as he can in helping the Church in its ambitions to expand its influence in education. He said in parliament recently:
 “We praise and cherish the role of the Church of England in making sure children have an outstanding education. I welcome the [Chadwick report on church schools of the future] and look forward to working with Bishop John Pritchard to extend the role of the Church in school provision.”
We do not believe the religious education as such should come from the shools. Most work of evangelisation has to be done in the household; In the family should there be the living faith, giving the flame of the fire from one person to the other. Next should come the parish or the church community where there should be elders enlightening people and getting as many as possible involved so that they really can feel they are part of a living paris, and forming a thriving spiritual community.

It may be overly optimistic to read a lot into these developments Odone presents, but she truly thinks these are the first shoots of a Christian Spring.
We only can hope for the best and see how the new pope may bring a fresh spirit in the Catholic church, forcing others to take a new move as well.

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