Churches dying out in the U.K.
(Jonathan Petre, The Telegraph, October 12, 2005)
Britain's Churches are in such serious decline that if they were shops, they would have been declared bankrupt long ago, Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said last night.
In a bleak assessment of the future of Christianity in this country, he said that the Churches were approaching meltdown and the "last rites" could be administered at any moment.
His outspoken comments will dismay some Church leaders, who privately complain that he has repeatedly breached the tradition that retired archbishops refrain from stirring controversy.
But friends insisted that he was intending to indicate his backing for Dr Williams's Fresh Expressions initiative, designed to encourage alternative forms of worship.
Speaking at St Michael's church in Amersham-on-the-Hill, Dr Carey said that all the Christian denominations had suffered plunging congregations.
"No Anglican can be satisfied that only one in 50 people attend this national Church," he said.
posted by LoZo 6:59 AM
Catholic Church says the Bible isn't true
(Ruth Gledhill, The Times, October 5, 2005)
The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect "total accuracy" from the Bible. . . . "We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision," they say in The Gift of Scripture. . . . Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in schools, believing "intelligent design" to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began. . . . But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be "historical". . . . They say the Church must offer the gospel in ways "appropriate to changing times, intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries". [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Isn't this just another way of saying, "We'd better change our wild stories and make them more believable so we can capture even more simple-minded people into our cult."] . . . They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its "intransigent intolerance" and to warn of "significant dangers" involved in a fundamentalist approach. . . . As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing. . . . Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb. . . . The bishops say: "Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come."
posted by LoZo 9:39 AM
