Unbelievable!
Archbishop chooses Easter to cast doubt on Resurrection
ONE of Britain’s leading Anglican clerics has sparked controversy by casting doubts over the Resurrection of Jesus – just days before Easter.
The Archbishop of Wales, John Davies, has been accused of ‘sowing confusion’ over the biblical story that will be celebrated by millions around the world today.
Asked in an interview about the New Testament account of Jesus rising from the tomb, the Archbishop said: ‘I don’t think any of us actually knows, quite frankly.’
He told online magazine Christian Today that it was ‘ terribly hard’ for people to grasp the idea of a bodily resurrection.
The 65-year-old Archbishop, who was elected in September to head the Church in Wales – the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England – said something ‘ radical’ had happened that had changed people’s lives. But he then referred to one of the Church’s most contentious theologians, the l ate Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, who was accused of blasphemy for questioning the physical nature of the Resurrection when he described it as ‘a conjuring trick with bones’.
Three days after Dr Jenkins was consecrated as a bishop in York Minister in 1984, the cathedral was hit by lightning and gutted by fire – an event some blamed on divine displeasure.
Echoing Bishop Jenkins’ remarks, Archbishop Davies, a former solicitor, said the Resurrection was ‘about something far more than a dead body coming back to life – it is the complete renewal of the being of Christ’.
Although surveys have found that a significant number of Anglican clergy doubt or disbelieve the physical resurrection of Christ, it is rare for senior leaders to openly express such reservations, particularly at this time of year.
Former Bis hop o f Rochester Michael Nazir- Ali said there was plenty of evidence in the Bible to support the ‘simplest explanation’ of the empty tomb – that Christ rose from the dead.
In a stinging attack, he added: ‘There are many things the Archbishop may not know, but there is enough for him to preach the Easter faith confidently and to strengthen the faith of others rather than sow doubt and confusion at this central time in our calendar.’
In his interview, Archbishop Davies said there were almost contradictory accounts in the Gospels about how the risen Christ had appeared to his disciples, saying: ‘I don’t think anyone can tell you what happened when it comes to empty tombs.’
The Archbishop told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no doubting that the disciples experienced the presence of the risen Christ and the faith of today’s church is rooted in their experience. The difficulty with the biblical accounts is they all differ in detail but, as I said in the interview, and very clearly, they all add up to the same truth – that Christ is risen.’
The row follows reports that Pope Francis had denied the existence of Hell, although Vatican officials said his words had been misrepresented.
LAST week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been. We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.
But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.
He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.
Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.
Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.
But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he ( knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.
In aggressively secular, hard-boiled France, this must have been difficult to do. Those of us who try to cling to the shreds of religion in the modern world feel increasingly besieged and hopelessly unfashionable.
MY LATE brother Christopher was a militant atheist (but a good deal more t houghtful t han most). He used to delight crowds of his supporters by demanding: ‘ Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.’
In the end he tired of his own question and told me that he had found an answer. He thought that Lech Walesa, the lone and indomitable leader of Polish resistance to the might of communism, would never have dared take on such a huge and merciless enemy without his faith to sustain him. I suspect he would have felt the same about Arnaud Beltrame. And if this is true, and I think it is, is it time the rest of us wondered whether the West’s long mockery and dismissal of religion as childish and outmoded should now come to an end?
We need to know the difference between how things are, and how they ought to be, or what do we live and die for?
THE BBC has (of course) given great prominence to yet another anti-grammar school ‘report’ by academics. As usual it is based only on the tiny rump of surviving grammars almost all in well-off areas because spiteful, dogmatic Labour councils closed most of the grammars in poor districts. But the BBC and other Left-wing media never seem to notice the many reports from the Sutton Trust, which show that the better comprehensive schools are savagely biased against children from poor homes.
The Trust found that 91 of the 100 most socially selective schools in England and Wales were officially ‘comprehensive’. In theory, they are open to all, but in fact they are most open to the well-off through catchment areas and other more complex factors that also favour the rich and pushy. The only solution the Sutton Trust can come up with is allocating places by lottery, a mad idea. They should look at how well grammars once worked, when we had enough of them. In 1954, the Gurney-Dixon Report found that roughly 65 per cent of pupils at grammar schools in England and Wales came from working-class homes. How many modern ‘good’ comprehensives can claim anything like the same?
THE one undoubtedly good thing about the new and gruelling film Unsane is that one of its villains is the ever-growing power of psychiatry and the pill industry that has taken it over.
Claire Foy plays an unhappy young woman who unwisely tells her woes to a counsellor and suddenly finds herself locked up in a mental institution, being dosed with pills which are clearly making her genuinely ill. On a much smaller scale, this is a terribly common story all over the Western world. I do wish people were more alert to it.