Following on from the statement about Christian belief issued in 1986 by the House of Bishops of the Church of England (reviewed in The Testimony, December 1986, pp. 388-90), the Doctrine Commission of the Church has now published a report which takes ‘established’ Christendom yet one more step astray into modernism and liberalism.
It has apparently taken the nineteen-member Commission six years of careful deliberation to decide that’ fixed’ doctrine should be a thing of the past, and that theologians must henceforth be open to scientific methods of analysis, ready to doubt anything (’empiricism’ it is called), and prepared to revise Christian teaching in the light of ‘evidence’.
We Believe in God is a strange title for what is possibly the most liberal statement of faith ever promulgated by the Church of England. It admits to entertaining doubts about virtually everything, and justifies this uncertainty on the grounds that science—and particularly the “new Physics”—is in a similar state of ebb and flow. It introduces, for example, the idea of ‘models’ of reality ( a concept borrowed from scientific relativism), by which ‘working hypotheses’ and approximations’ are substituted for Divine revelation and absolute truths. Jesus, we are told, offers a ‘model’ of Divine reality—by which we are meant to understand that the Biblical accounts of Jesus cannot, and should not be expected to, show us the reality itself.
The ‘model’ of God as King—which has served the Christian ( and the Jewish) faith for so many centuries—should now, it appears, be laid aside, since monarchy is generally out of fashion in the modern world. And in the place of such an outmoded conception of God, the faithful are encouraged to think of Him now in terms of the artist struggling with his materials.
Suggestions such as these—many of which fly in the face of Scripture—are typical of the Doctrine Commission’s general attitude towards the Word of God. To read the following comment about the Bible will make every Christadelphian wonder if the clergy are even talking about the same book as the one with which we are so familiar:
“The Bible is not the kind of book which can easily be made to yield a single and consistent doctrine. . . the more carefully one studies the Bible, the more one becomes aware of ideas of God and responses to him which seem actually to conflict with one another”.
This statement is the exact opposite of what we ourselves find to be the case from diligent Bible study. The difference of view can, surely, only be accounted for by the clergy’s fundamentally different approach; and perhaps we are seeing in such false conclusions clear evidence that God only “looks” to those who “tremble” at His Word.
Here and there in the report, however, we do find survivals from a creed which was once a good deal more dogmatic and confidently assertive—reassurances about the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus, for example—but generally such ‘fundamentalism’ is avoided in the elaboration of an empirical theology. Christianity’s common ground with other religions is emphasised, in a sort of pan-cosmic ecumenism. All religions, says the report, “are in touch in some degree with a single reality which, in these different idioms, is acknowledged and worshipped as God”.
For Christadelphians, of course, this kind of approach is a far cry from the plain message of the New Testament writers, for whom those not in Christ are still “strangers from the covenants of promise. . . and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12), and for whom the revealed truths of the Word of God are not ( and never could be) subject to the uncertain fashions of clerical philosophy.
Yet there is even worse to come in the report; for, not content with trimming its sails to a ‘modern’ scientific wind, the Doctrine Commission sets about taking on board into its theology just about every other modernism also. And if the Commission’s preoccupation with the problems of poverty, of pastoral care, and of political pressure to achieve social objectives is not surprising in view of the way the established churches have been moving over the last few decades, and if an expression of concern about nuclear energy and defence has come to be expected from today’s church theologians, it is nevertheless genuinely disturbing to find serious recognition in the report of the so-called ‘feminine’ aspects of God, and even more so to hear the faithful being advised to think of Jesus’s claim to Divine Sonship only in relativistic terms—by which is meant that if Jesus had lived in some other historical context he would have made some different claim, and that “his teachings about God naturally take some of their colour from the characteristic emphasis of Judaism in his time”.
But the final indignity of the report—from the point of view of the truths revealed in Scripture at least—is in its attitude towards the Bible’s teaching about the Resurrection of Jesus and the Virgin Birth. Whilst the latter is not so much as mentioned (do any of the Commission’s members believe in it?), the former is presented as a subject for legitimate doubt and debate, and the following extract is typical of the Church’s contemporary flight from certainty:
“That different views are possible, both about the evidence of the New Testament itself, and about the implications of a Christian doctrine of God and of Christ, is a reminder of the inevitable imperfections and corrigibility of the models which we use for our understanding of God”.
The Bishop of Durham may be pleased with such expressions of uncertainty; but there can be no doubt that with this report the Church of England has moved even further away from apostolic truth. How much further it can go without losing every vestige of faith in God and His Word, only time will tell.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)