Peter Mullen

Imagine my surprise – no, shock would be the better word – when I learned last week that the ruling elite in the Church of England are all lefties. I stand ready to receive further news: that perhaps after all the Pope is a catholic. Harry Pinker is an ordinand and he wrote recently in The Spectator: “I have not in two years at my theological college, heard anything other than leftwing bias in preaching either from the staff or from visiting speakers.”

Such is the totalitarian nature of today’s C of E that Harry Pinker is a pseudonym and the writer dare not name his college. Of course he daren’t. He would be stopped in his tracks by the bishop or at the very least blacklisted for life.

Of course, anyone who has been closely involved with the Church over the last 40 years knows very well that the institution is run by ideological socialists. From Faith in the City and opposition to the Falklands War, from the Synod’s flirtation with unilateral nuclear disarmament to the disgraceful current opposition to any reform of the bloated benefits – dependency culture, the Church resembles no longer the Tory Party at prayer but the Socialist Party at the barricades.

How and why did this change come about? The explanation is simple. When you give up believing in the Bible and reject classic Christian doctrines, there is really no option but to become a politically correct, socialist progressive. I have seen this come about over the whole course of my 44 years as a priest.

First the Bible. The churchly elite – though not the people in the pews – were converted to Bultmann’s doctrine of demythologising, popularised in the 1960s in Bishop JAT Robinson’s books Honest to God and But That I Can’t Believe. The resurrection of Christ became incredible and so he did not rise. Rather, it was just a case of “the disciples’ experience of new life.” Inexplicable if Christ remained dead. Or, as that bête noir of the liberal church leaders St Paul put it, “if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain.” Yes indeed: the liberals’ faith is vanity. Jesus didn’t miraculously raise Lazarus or even feed the 5000. The feeding of the 5000 was just “an acted parable about sharing” – a sort of socialist picnic.

And, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, Jesus was no longer believed to be the incarnate Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, but only “the Labour member for Galilee South.”

At the same time as the Bible was being demythologised and debunked, doctrine went down the pan too. This was made explicit in several doctrinal reports and significantly in the doggerel near atheism of the new church services. No mention of worms or vile bodies at funerals. No statement of the fact that marriage was ordained “as a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication” among men who are always tempted to behave “like brute beasts with no understanding.”

In other words, the Church of England hierarchy and the powerful fellow travellers in the synodical bureaucracy lost such grip as they ever held on reality and failed to see human nature for what it is: fallen and deeply flawed. This utter

Reform will come, but it will come from new movements of

the Spirit enlivening faith