CHEXIT:- Staying, leaving or consecrating new bishops
by Gavin Ashenden:
The Church Society, through its president Dr Gatiss, has offered an enthusiastic case for staying in the Church of England as opposed to leaving it. But the choices before us are less binary than that. Some have left already, but for those who stay, the terms on which they stay need to be altered.
It has become the practice of the C of E to subjugate the authority of the Bible to the prevailing culture and zeitgeist. Dr Gatiss begins his argument by expressing reservations about the lack of confidence his constituency has in the structures of the Church of England.
‘Structures’.
But the structures are not the issue. When he writes ‘the structures’ I think he means, or ought to mean something else. The problem is not caused by General Synod, as a malfunctioning Synod, or appointments committees mismanaging their agendas. It difficulty is caused by the scale of the way in which the C of E has been taken over by a majority of people in senior and other positions who hold secular, socialist and egalitarian ideologies.
We have for example, been presented with decades of egalitarian gender theory. Slowly but surely, the mystical gender theology of St Paul has been downgraded, ignored and now disowned, even by evangelical Christians, who used to self-define by their admiration of the principle of the authority of Scripture.
‘Equality’ is a rough and uncompromising political too masquerading as a theological proposition. In the form we use it in our culture, It is not found in Scripture. It ought to come as no surprise that if we use this secular, political idea as a lens through which we refract revelation, we will end up with a distortion of the Gospel, Christian anthropology and the Church itself.
‘The equality of genders’ was always going to lead on to ‘equal’ or homosexual marriage. And so, the whole weight of Scriptural narrative which was intended to foster and forge purity in everything from social to sexual relations is being sidelined by the C of E as it adopts this new culture as normal.
Once the office was opened to them on political rather than theological grounds, It should have been obvious that the first generation of women bishops would bring with them as their politico-theological baggage, a passionate belief in the virtues of homosexual relations and marriage. After all, if this political idea of equality has served to get them to where they wanted to be, then it must be honoured and practiced in its other manifestations.
Feminism led inevitably to gay marriage. And gay marriage leads immediately on the exploration and celebration of the ‘Trans experiment’ . In stark opposition to “male and female He made them” the trans community reject the anthropology that Genesis and Jesus bear witness to. The mental distress and confusion of the of the trans community becomes an emblem of secular experiment and gender incoherence that the equality advocates committed to progressive values, within and beyond the episcopate support and promote. This tragic and tiny group of people whose mental maps had become unstuck from their biology, represent the pain and sadness of the greater journey leading beyond the scope of the purposes of God for us.
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