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This is a notice from my nearest Church of England establishment, concerning their programme of Lent Study for this year:
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Title: "THY WILL BE DONE... ON EARTH"
Week 1: Caring for the environment
Week 2: Eradicate hunger and poverty
Week 3: Life before death
Week 4: Promote gender equality
Week 5: Building a global partnership
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I don't think any comment or amplification is required. A course in this-worldly secular political correctness is regarded as suitable fare for the major devotional period of the Christian calendar.
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This church is not generally considered to be especially 'liberal' by Anglican standards (ahem), although there are priestesses, modernised language services and they have joined this organisation:
http://inclusive-church.org.uk/
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What has all this to do with Christianity? What indeed. One can see that the organisation is lineally descended from Christian churches; that there are frequent references to God and Jesus - but since they have rejected the consensus of 2000 years whenever it conflicted with mainstream New Left radicalism, it is hard to be sure what the references really mean, or what surprising new discoveries about the nature of Christianity they will be announcing over the coming months or years.
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When a Church is systematically deploying secular reasoning to evaluate Christianity, then can it be said to be Christian?
When this happens - week after week, in sermons, intercessionary prayers, and formal teaching - is not the net effect strongly anti-Christian.
This is what I term (as shorthand) an Antichrist phenomenon: by which I mean a phenomenon that contains enough Christian elements to be deceptively attractive to Good people, but which in its major thrust is working to subvert the Good and displace Christianity.
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On the other hand, I attend another local 'mainstream' Anglican church (which is neither evangelical nor Anglo-Catholic) in a gorgeous medieval building - where in all the sermons and prayers - I have never heard anything but deep, traditional, sound teaching.
So all is not yet lost.
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Note added - Don Colacho:
In their childish and vain attempt to attract the people, the modern clergy give socialist programs the function of being schemes for putting the Beatitudes into effect. The trick behind it consists in reducing to a collective structure external to the individual an ethical behavior that, unless it is individual and internal, is nothing.
The modern clergy preach, in other words, that there is a social reform capable of wiping out the consequences of sin.
From which one can deduce the pointlessness of redemption through Christ.
http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2011/03/2982.html
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The Catholic Church, or the greater part of its membership seems to have been wrapped up in progressive politics for many decades. It has only ever been anti-communist to the extent communists suppressed the church. Otherwise- liberation theology! Communism for everyone!
ReplyDeleteAnd yet the Gospels of Matthew and Luke seem to be pretty well progressive- or at least the progressive reading of them is not prima facie wrong. Pacifism, the poor come first, etc. Was Jesus a liberal?
@Th - "And yet the Gospels of Matthew and Luke seem to be pretty well progressive- or at least the progressive reading of them is not prima facie wrong. Pacifism, the poor come first, etc. Was Jesus a liberal? "
ReplyDeleteI guess you're joking, winding me up - yes?
But it is a common fallacy in these ignorant and arrogant times - the extraordinary notion that for more than 1800 years the Apostles, Holy Fathers and Saints all failed to notice what modern society - in all its worldliness and hedonism - clearly perceives: that Christianity is *really* all about coercive extraction and state distribution of resources... (irony alert).
Depressing. Enough said.
ReplyDeleteImnobody.
On the contrary, the Catholic Church is the leading force against Left and has never compromised with the Left agenda.
ReplyDeleteBut it does not agree that any criticism of the dogma of Adam Smith and von Mises is illegitimate.