Conservatives claim that declining numbers in progressive congregations are the result of progressive, non-Biblical, non-orthodox, non-traditional, non-creedal formulations of Christianity. I claim that declining numbers are due to people abandoning the Church because people think traditional theologies are no longer believable.
We need to get this toxic theology out of the Church
The theology and behaviour of the Anglican Church is intolerable
Clinging to faith is increasingly problematic
The Church is making the faith less and less attractive with a theology that messes people up
Bad theology is in the bloodstream of the Church
Passionless sex is very problematic
Jesus was processing his life of human experience and emotions and relationships with exactly the same resources as you and I process our lives and experience. One difference between us (not the difference between divine and human nature) is that our experience, if we are Christians, is processed through the constructs of theology and faith that evolved following Jesus’ death and have been evolving ever since. We are programmed in a way Jesus wasn’t.
There are, within specific cultural and social frameworks, specific bodies that have been regarded as particularly vile: those of a particular sex, race, religion, tribe, sexual orientation, disability or age. “Powerful Christians have regarded as abhorrent not merely the bodies of women but the bodies of many other perceived ‘others’, for example Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, people of colour, heretics.”
Do gay people contaminate the Church of England? This question has been haunting me since I learnt yesterday that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York seem to have accepted the resignation of the Revd Andrew Hammond, Chaplain at St John’s College, Cambridge, openly gay and appointed as chaplain to the General Synod by the Archbishops last year. Andrew offered his resignation as a result of homophobic reactions to his contribution to the act of worship at Synod on Tuesday morning, part of an act of worship themed round humility. Andrew’s key point was that humility is the opposite of the sin of pride. The Gay Pride movement is using the word as the opposite of a sin that produces humiliation and shame.
