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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.

There seems to be many signs of this, such as the rise of Black Liberation Theology in the church:

Then, last December, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York appointed Dr Sanjee Perera as their new Adviser on “Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns” – i.e. on race and racism. Their press release linked her appointment with the Taskforce and Race Commission, in which she will no doubt play a major part. For her part, Perera has written of how the church has “long been steeped in a racialised agenda”, and how its “patriarchal, heteronormative, ableist and racialised theology” has “justified slavery and Empire”. Earlier this month she helped organise a conference with Reddie entitled “Dismantling Whiteness; Critical White Theology”.

https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-critical-race-theory-captured-the-church/

Of course this kind of capitulation to the zeitgeist goes back further such as 1994 when they disobeyed the instructions of Saint Paul and started ordaining women as priests. Going further back, in 1928 the Church of England started phasing out the marriage vow for the wife to "obey", which seems like it was floating with the Zeitgeist of first-wave feminism. Over the past two centuries there seems to have been a steady stream of English who were very serious about their religion converting from Anglican to Catholicism, a sign that there was a feeling that Anglicanism was somehow less legitimate (eg, John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton). Or course Catholicism is suffering from its own problems of being converged by the Zeitgeist.

And Catholicism suffering from its own problems of being converged by the Zeitgeist would be, itself, an interesting top level post with some important recent happenings that I'm (vaguely)working on, but for a variety of reasons has less institutional ability to adopt the zeitgeist and less willingness to do so.

I look forward to reading your post. I hope you are right.

I would distinguish pressure to conform to the culture, which all churches experience, from conformance as a source of legitimacy. Women’s ordination sure does look like the latter, though. I don’t know the terms of the debate over the word obey, but I would be interested to learn them; I recall reading Legg’s work at one point, and he writes largely in terms of precedent.

I am pretty sure that the Anglo-Catholics (whether they remained Anglicans or swam the Tiber) made their arguments against their low church brethren in other terms than conformity.

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