When the Church endows Jesus with a divine nature and magical powers and his followers with spiritual powers way beyond anything we are capable of, the result is fantasy faith, the belief that God has and will intervene to short-circuit human emotions and experience. That’s where conflict in the faith of the Church of England resides today.
Bringing yourself to life might be a very good, brief description of what motivates me as a Christian priest. In the course of my life I have discovered that “life in all its fullness” is something to be discovered and ‘worked on’ in our Selves, our bodies, emotions, energy, breathing. In the here and now of our being is where we encounter God and where our spiritual work is to be done, the work that enriches, enhances and energises our experience of God and his Son Jesus Christ, the life-giver and unconditional lover whose way is “life in all its fullness.
How do you present a really radical argument about the revolutionary change in today’s society for LGBTIQ+ people to a Church that refuses to take on board the implications of the revolution? I have used extensive quotations from chapter four, Resurrection and Goodness, of Harry Williams’1972 book, True Resurrection, to describe what I think are the implications of Changing Attitude England’s campaign to give content to the radical new LGBTIQ+ (because that’s what it primarily has to be about) Christian inclusion advocated by the Archbishops.
In April 1984 Channel 4 broadcast three one hour long documentary programmes titled Jesus: the Evidence. Three of the issues addressed in the programmes were that Jesus never called himself God in the Gospels; that the titles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels (e.g. ‘Son of God’) were not in fact used during his lifetime; that Jesus, as a Jew, was hardly likely to have claimed to be God. I find myself wondering how many Church of England clergy still believe that Jesus thought of himself as divine, the Son of God. How many think that Matthew and Luke’s birth narratives are historically true? How many think the resurrection narratives in the four gospels are accurate historical accounts of an event that happened?
