CofE bishops don’t believe in God? That’s laughable nonsense
by Tim Wyatt, Premier Christianity:
While the Church is no stranger to misreporting, Tim Wyatt says a recent Spectator article was especially egregious.
No doubt this is true of other niche specialisms, but a perennial bugbear of being a church journalist is that so much coverage of the church by the mainstream press is just embarrassingly wrong. A lot of this is forgivable when it comes to trying to sum up tediously complicated theological disputes or navigate the medieval bureaucracy of an ancient denomination. But sometimes it’s just out of ignorance and clumsiness.
I clicked on a link to a piece in The Spectator entitled ‘The End of the Church of England’ with some interest…And I got precisely to the bottom of the first paragraph before giving up in irritation.
The writer reports a conversation with a friend of theirs, a lapsed Anglican vicar who quit after losing his faith:
”He said what I have long suspected; that almost none of those in the hierarchy of the Church today believe in the central tenets of their faith: the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of the dead, the miracles of Jesus, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell, life after death, or even a benevolent God.”
Nope. Just not true. Objectively wrong. There are probably a handful of senior clerics in today’s CofE who are flat out atheists, who linger in the church out of an affection for its cultural milieu (or because they couldn’t get a job anywhere else) but no longer believe anything. A dean here, an archdeacon there, perhaps. But the suggestion that “the guardians of that faith are today little more than hollowed-out hypocrites going through the ritualistic motions” is ridiculous. The idea a large majority of the hierarchy of bishops don’t believe in Jesus, the resurrection, life after death or even the existence of God himself is laughable nonsense.