Pessimists say that the C.of E. is in terminal decline. And one has to admit that if nothing is done, it does look like that. However the Church has passed through bad periods in the past, and recovered; for example Dean Inge in his “Outspoken Essays” wrote that if Jesus Christ had somehow returned to this world in the Middle Ages, without super-natural power, he would have been burned. You cannot get much lower than that; when those running the religion, which was in his name, would have found the presence of the Founder quite intolerable, and dispatched him! They would not burn him nowadays; but they would outvote and out-manoeuvre him on committees. So what would a person accustomed to speaking with authority, say about the present situation? Would he regard it as hopeless? Or would he recognise what was wrong, and endeavour to work out whether anything could be done to put it right? First of all then, what is wrong?
The clergy of the C.of E. resolutely refuse to lift their eyes, take in creation as a whole, and then ask themselves how their religion fits in with what they see. Their vision is entirely limited to the inside of the obsequious grotto of Jesus-worship; and they will not, or cannot, see anything outside it. They regard any suggestion that one should do this, as being disloyal to Jesus. Whereas if the two World Wars did nothing else, they taught us to view the world as a whole. They greatly accelerated technology, culminating in the atomic bomb and the beginning of rocketry, with the German unmanned rockets, V-I and V-II. Yuri Gagarin would never have circled the earth in his Sputnik, if the two World Wars had not taken place. Maybe someone else would have done something similar eventually; but Yuri Gagarin would not have done it without the technology which the wars fostered. However, now that he has done it, we have all seen photographs of the earth appearing as a beautiful bluish sphere largely covered in cloud; and the sight is unforgettably beautiful. Whether it is in war, in terrorism, in business, in philanthropy, or as holiday-makers, we all view the world now as a whole – except Christians. They seem to forget that other people think they are be-witched by a man, who in his lifetime was an obscure 1st century Jewish Messianic prophet. It is only they who think he is different; and the onus is on them to prove he is different, if they want others to share their beliefs. There were, of course, a number of other Messianic prophets about that time, most of whom did not come to much good. He was not the only one; but he does stand out from the others, in that he is coupled with the myth that he was raised from the dead. But when the clergy of the C.of E. seem utterly incapable of repeating the healing miracles that this prophet is supposed to have performed, the resurrection loses its credibility.