If you ever wanted to witness the real-time evolution of a traditional faith system from one of meaning and purpose to a pointless Sunday Garden Party, the Church of England has your ticket.
The biggest news story to come out of the church’s gathering was that some within the Church of England are calling for 2000-year-old references to God as He, Him or Father to be banished, instead using gender-neutral or female alternatives.
Leaders at the synod took written questions from those attending. One question came from the Reverend Joanna Stobart, an Anglican minister, who wanted to know what steps were being taken to offer alternatives to God with male pronouns. Specifically, she hoped “to develop more inclusive language in our authorized liturgy.”
The Bishop of Lichfield, Michael Ipgrave, serving as Vice Chair of the church’s Liturgical Commission provided a reply that excited those seeking the change. “We have been exploring the use of gendered language in relation to God for several years in collaboration with the Faith and Order Commission. After some dialogue between the two commissions in this area, a new joint project on gendered language will begin this spring.”
In America, they call it the Episcopal church, with which I’m somewhat familiar. My uncle was an Episcopalian Bishop, and until his passing twenty-plus years ago, we’d get the odd bit of inside baseball. But most of the migration away from traditional church doctrine has occurred since then, so I’m more of an outside observer – which is not a bad thing. Much of what I write is from outside whatever institution is the object of my bleary eye. You come here to read my thoughts about this or that, and I have a few about the Synod, which has already been pointed out here.
The story of Jesus Christ may be the best known and certainly the most read of any man to have ever set foot on planet earth. Christians believe Jesus was born to the ever-virgin Mary, sometimes referred to as “the mother of God.” She conceived Jesus through a miracle, thanks to the Holy Spirit. While some doubters have questioned her virgin status, virtually nowhere in history has there been any credible debate that Mary was Jesus’ mother. At no point has there been a serious discussion that Mary herself was God.
With those two points undisputed, it seems illogical that Christians could take to referring to God as She or Her. If one believes Jesus was the son of God and that Mary was His mother, and that she wasn’t God, simple logic tells us God can’t be referred to as She.
Far more importantly, though, are the words of Jesus himself. He spoke frequently about his Father in Heaven. He gave us the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with the words “Our Father.” He was not ambiguous.
There is, of course, no limit to the ways in which they/them can massage anything to fit into whatever shaped hole needs filling, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Judeo-Christian doctrine is filled with stories about every sort of person/people wandering off the morality plantation only to have bad things happen to them. It’s almost as if someone accurately observed human behavior and came up with a way to explain how not to suffer quite so much as a result. With a slight bit of prompting, almost anyone can manage to live productive, meaningful lives during which we prepare the future generation for similar success, unburdened by the absolute inevitability of death.
The rest of it might be window dressing, and while the carpet doesn’t have to match the drapes, at some point, you’ll have wandered so far away from the foundation that there’s hardly any point to any of it. With nothing upon which to stand, what little there was that made sense ceases to function as anything other than an increasingly lousy reason to get up early on Sunday morning.
And I think that’s exactly what the Secular Humanists infiltrators have been after all these years. And maybe you’d rather side with them, but modern totalitarian societies make it a point to ensure that the only higher power you recognize is the state, and while some people and some faiths have had a spotty record when it comes to morality, rights, and humanity, the depots are still batting zero, and we’ve no reason to believe that will ever change.
The Church of England is headed in the wrong direction, and I think everyone knows it.
For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.
Membership in The Church of England is in a demographic spiral and being woke by pretending that more inclusive language will help is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
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