Thinking allowed

3 comments

• Simon Kershaw says:

  13 February 2015 at 8.01 am

  As sched­uled for Thursday after­noon, the ‘Take Note’ motion was moved by the Chair of the Revi­sion Com­mit­tee (the Bish­op of Truro) and was approved.

  Accord­ingly these Altern­at­ive Bap­tism Texts, as revised by the com­mit­tee, now go to the House of Bish­ops, who have the respons­ib­il­ity for intro­du­cing texts in their final form for the Syn­od to approve. Approv­al of texts altern­at­ive to those in the 1662 BCP require two-thirds major­it­ies in all three Houses of the Synod.

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• James says:

  14 February 2015 at 1.03 pm

  “Those who work with young people give con­stant advice that ref­er­ences to the dev­il are likely to be mis­un­der­stood in today’s cul­ture” quoth the Bish­op of Truro in com­mend­ing these new texts. It’s a pity he did­n’t take advice from some theo­lo­gians, his­tor­i­ans, social sci­ent­ists and even ther­ap­ists! I won­der if he spoke to some par­ish priests work­ing in places where ‘the dev­il and all his works’ are mani­fest in bul­ly­ing indi­vidu­als in church life, or where abuse is rife in the com­munity, or struc­tur­al evil is felt most acutely through eco­nom­ic and polit­ic­al factors? So, once again, the Church of Eng­land has been enabled to pro­pose a change in its doc­trine through the tweak­ing of litur­gic­al texts. If the Bish­op of Truro and his revi­sion com­mit­tee had placed more emphas­is on the need for lit­er­ate and ima­gin­at­ive clergy, who would rel­ish the pos­sib­il­ity of work­ing-through the exist­ing texts and help­ing “those who work with young people” and fam­il­ies seek­ing bap­tism for their chil­dren to make con­nec­tions between the lan­guage and images of the liturgy and the world they inhab­it, we might stand a chance of over­com­ing the mis­un­der­stand­ing to which he refers. As Giles Fraser says in today’s Guard­i­an “wicked­ness flour­ishes in the dark, when it is not faced or recog­nised. This is why I regret the devil’s passing. He was a power­ful and sym­bol­ic rep­res­ent­a­tion of human evil… at his best, he was a very human pro­jec­tion of ourselves and our darkest nature. And that is some­thing we face not nearly enough.” 

  I hope Syn­od mem­bers will be robust, once these texts come back for approv­al, and that the House of Bish­ops invite some ser­i­ous theo­lo­gic­al minds to engage with these texts, too. If we change the doc­trine of bap­tism by tweak­ing the texts, where will that place our sig­ni­fic­ant ecu­men­ic­al rela­tion­ships (think ARCIC and Lima, for example)? 

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• Will Richards says:

  17 February 2015 at 5.50 pm

  First, the dev­il is removed from the bap­tis­mal liturgy because such ref­er­ences are likely to be “mis­un­der­stood.” Does that now mean the funer­al liturgy needs to be revised to remove expli­cit ref­er­ences to death, because these may prove prob­lem­at­ic in a cul­ture that does­n’t like to talk about it (Death is noth­ing at all…)? Or what about ref­er­ences to the life-long cov­en­antal char­ac­ter of mar­riage, in a soci­ety where divorce rates are so high? And we had bet­ter get rid of that old Trin­ity chest­nut while we’re at it, because that’s bound to con­fuse isn’t it?

  Yes please. More theo­lo­gic­ally lit­er­ate clergy and rather less of these “access­ible” texts which simply sug­gest we’ve lost our nerve.

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