When the Church Starts improving on God!

The David Vance BriefingRead More

I wonder did you see this image which was splashed across social media recently?

It shows the first female Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally presenting a guy called Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi with an award for “Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation” The fully veiled woman in the middle of the pic is his wife. He’s the chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council – a group of Islamic scholars. He’s a very problematic character in his own regard but funnily enough that’s NOT what I want to talk to you about!

You see I think there’s something revealing about this image but not for the reason its admirers seem to imagine. Some of them claim “centuries of incremental adaptation and contextual or applied theology” have delivered “sex equality” to the Church of England, culminating in a woman now occupying its highest spiritual office.

Just consider those words.

Incremental adaptation.

Those two words are the core problem and it’s one that any Christian should instantly get!

You see Christianity is not supposed to be a faith which each generation inherits and then modifies to suit the prevailing culture. It claims something entirely different: that God has revealed His truth to us and we must conform ourselves to it.

Paul puts it rather clearly:

“Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
— Romans 12:2

Yet this modern Church of England appears to operate that principle in reverse. I see it increasingly as a heretical Church and a shameful one.

The world changes, so the Church must change. The idea seems to be that as society changes a new morality, Scripture must be “reinterpreted”. It must evolve. Things that Christians have believed for centuries suddenly become a problem and — miraculously — a new interpretation appears which just happens to coincide with whatever secular society currently believes.

The hard truth here is that Christianity adapting to the times.

It is surrendering to them.

Look, I’m not saying that Christianity should ignore changing circumstances. Nobody disputes that. We all see that technology changes, politics changes and Society itself changes.

But God doesn’t. That’s the entire point. Nor does His Word.

Further, as far as I see can see it, the Church has absolutely no authority to rewrite it.

Let’s look at a few of the core problems; Take ordained ministry.

Christ chose twelve apostles and all of them were men. The apostolic Church followed that pattern. Paul writes that he does not permit a woman “to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man” (1 Timothy 2:12). When describing an overseer, he speaks of the “husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2).

Naturally enough Christians disagree over the interpretation and application of these passages. But what cannot simply be brushed aside is the fact that the historic Christian understanding of ministry wasn’t invented by Victorian patriarchs.

It reaches straight back to the beginnings of Christianity.

And that brings us to the real significance of this photograph.

We are apparently supposed to look at the unveiled female Christian cleric beside the fully veiled Muslim woman and congratulate ourselves on how wonderfully progressive Anglicanism has become. But I look at it and see a Church boasting about how successfully it has adapted Christianity.

That should alarm all Christians. Why? Well, because once “incremental adaptation” becomes the principle, where will it stop?

If Scripture conflicts with modern attitudes towards ordination, reinterpret Scripture. If it conflicts with contemporary sexual morality, reinterpret Scripture. And when Christ’s uncompromising declaration that “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” becomes awkward in our multifaith society, what then?

Do we “contextualise” that as well?

If you go down this road far enough eventually Christianity becomes nothing more than the values of the secular establishment dressed up in clerical vestments. It becomes a Whited Sepulchre.

God is permitted to speak — provided He agrees with us. That could not be more wrong and I think the word apostasy suddenly seems apt,

The issue here is authority. Who ultimately decides what Christianity teaches?

God — or us?

If Scripture is authoritative only until its teaching collides with contemporary fashion, then Scripture isn’t really authoritative at all.

We are.

This is precisely the danger facing the Church of England today and it’s been heading in this direction for decades if we are honest about it. It increasingly seems desperate to demonstrate its relevance to a society which has largely stopped attending its churches, while simultaneously becoming embarrassed about proclaiming the very doctrines that once gave those churches a reason to exist.

It’s so painful to behold.

As the Church changes itself to become more acceptable to the modern world the modern world continues walking away from it anyway.

The job of the Church of England isn’t to incrementally adapt Christianity until the twenty-first century fully approves of it. It is to proclaim Christianity. Islam does not change and it continues to grow. The Church of England keeps changing and shrinking.

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