The Archdruid Report: “Except in a few exceptional and very short-term situations, social order has remained intact and economies have adapted to extreme conditions, shedding energy- and resource-intensive sectors and establishing new networks to get food and other necessities to those who need them. This, rather than the total social collapse of the survivalist fantasy, is what we face in the next few decades.”

American Scientist Online – Escaping Illusion?: “Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine”

This is a mistake. The man needs to read Pirsig. (And Wittgenstein – ‘why can’t God act in accordance with a calculation?’)

The real problem with reviews such as these – and the books being reviewed – is that the material is vitiated by a profound ignorance of what religion actually is (or, better, what Christianity, Buddhism, Islam are). The debate is conducted within a bubble of late Protestant Atheism, and all dissonant material is bracketed out. For example, the understanding of ‘supernatural’ used in the review is wholly philosophically Modern and has no application to classical Christianity, ie that governing the formation of the faith for the first 1500 years.

Once upon a time I spent many hours writing a book aimed at trying to persuade this sort of culture of its error. I’ve lost all enthusiasm for the task, almost certainly because of my experience on MoQ.org with ‘the missing you’ (let the reader understand), and more substantially because other things have taken the foreground rather dramatically (Peak Oil, and Christian life in general) – but also because the intellectual foundations for this approach have been removed. It’s a paradigm shift, in the specific and strictly Kuhnian sense. Things will change once this present generation, without the emotional strength to embrace the change, has died out. The surface structure will take time to collapse, but collapse it will. The Twin Towers could stand as a metaphor for this – Babel towers, created and emodying a confident atheism; toppled by the Other, not taken account of in their philosophy.

Got James Alison’s latest book delivered today, which I’m really looking forward to devouring. By the way, I also downloaded his talk at Greenbelt, which was up to expectations. Have you read Judges 19-21 recently?

Also delivered was Helen Bannerman’s ‘Little Black Sambo’ which (for obvious reasons) was my favourite book when I was just beginning to read. I’m looking forward to sharing it with my kids.

Wunder Blog : Weather Underground: “Tropical Storm Gordon”

This is a great blog by the way, for those of you who aren’t aware of it (if you’re interested in this sort of thing).

I got caught on the other side of the Strood yesterday (the Strood being the causeway connecting Mersea to the mainland). As this was by no means unanticipated, I had taken my camera, parked in the driveway of a parishioner, and walked down to take some photos. In the middle of possibly the busiest Sunday I have ever had, this was a pleasant break.

“we are human, but we are not yet truly human”

Go read. This is what the next sequence of the Learning Church is about.

“When a church says it’s ‘relevant,’ I assume they are less faithful to the proclamation of God in Jesus Christ.

I think they mean to say, ‘our sermons and expositions of the Scriptures appeal to the values and lifestyles of people in our society.'”

Kyle hits the mark (again).

The Church of England is the established church within England. It was conceived as the church catholic within this territory. That is, it maintained the key catholic elements of orthodox christian faith; and, in the other sense of catholic, it offered itself to all comers. The unstated assumption behind this was that everyone who lived in the land was Christian.

When other religious perspectives were legitimised (especially RC in the 19th Century) something essential to the catholic identity of the church of England was irretrievably compromised. It became a sect. That sectarian ethos underlies the worldwide Anglican Communion, and is why splits are inevitable.

The Anglican identity is known by its liturgy. The effective abandonment of the BCP was also an effective abandonment of that identity.

The Anglican identity also rests upon the ‘tripod’ of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. That is a seam of theological insight which cannot be lost, and which is, in principle, something on which a sectarian community might be grounded.

By sect I don’t mean to be provocative. I mean a part of the body.

The Church of England cannot pay its way. It cannot, even now, finance a priest in every church. That situation will become financially much worse in the coming decades (not least because of the financial implications of Peak Oil). Consequently, the church will persist only in those communities with active lay participation and leadership (we won’t stop having priests; we will stop having full time stipendiary priests).

Looking at the statistics for church growth, and considering the various theologies of lay involvement, this implies that the membership of the Church of England, in short order, will become overwhelmingly evangelical. This process has already been in train for a while, but I can’t see any reason for it to stop.

Fortunately, the evangelical tradition (not just within the CofE) shows a healthy willingness to appropriate the historic faith; to move beyond the Reformation categories. That is a source of hope.

Ironically, the legal status of the CofE will act as a buffer absorbing many of the shocks that are coming to it, like the split with the conservative elements worldwide. (Further thought – how long before Akinola becomes a cardinal within Anglican Rite Catholicism?)

In what way is it an authentic acting out of the gospel to offer hatching, matching and despatching services to whomever might ask for it? Not to argue against sacrificial service, but a plea that the sacrament is not degraded to a charade.

The cultural shape within which the Church of England grew up and established itself socially, as opposed to legally, has vanished. The ‘George Herbert model’ – if it ever was appropriate – is clearly an impossible dream now. The role of the clergy is reducing down to more key essentials: sacramental ministry; teaching; spiritual direction. General chats accompanied by tea and cake – however much ministry might be enabled through them – are simply no longer tenable as a central pillar of priestly life.

What’s the point of the Church of England? Not – nota bene – ‘what’s the point of Christianity’ (which is something that is becoming ever more bright and lucid to me) but, why should there be an established church? How does being established enable us to be faithful?

It is as if our ears are filled with an echo. As there is still a lot of noise, we imagine that there is still a great stirring of the spirit corresponding to the noise. But it’s just an echo. The echo of a door being slammed as the vitality exits stage left.

I was once told a story, which I’m sure is apocryphal, but it’s a good story anyhow.

A new incumbent came to a parish, and took part in his first eucharist. As the procession was returning to the vestry, he noticed that the servers in the procession all ducked their heads at a point half way down the back aisle. After the service he asked why this was done. Nobody in the procession knew, it was simply ‘what we’ve always done’. So the new incumbent investigated, and, although he wasn’t sure, he came to a conclusion. Some thirty years before, there had been work done on the back aisle, which had involved a strut of scaffolding stretched across the back aisle. The procession had needed to duck to get past the iron bar – and the habit had persisted, even when the scaffolding had been taken down.

I’m not sure the Church of England should really be structured around scaffolding.

More to the point, I’m not sure how much longer I’m prepared to keep on ducking.

Of course, I could be wrong…: Global Cooling And The Anglican Church: “Also, and I am sorry to have to tell you this, John Bell and the Iona Community are so B.O.F. as to be the worship equivalent of Des O’Connor hosting ‘Tonight At The London Palladium.’ In fact, all alternative worship is out, out, out, unless the leader of it has used his authority to sleep with all the members of his congregation and has been banished by the Church into outer darkness.”

MadPriest makes me LOL yet again.

“The Christian Bill of Rights”

Great stuff. (Via Monastic Mumblings)