The clergy cannot see that it is they who have let the side down. The Last Discourses in John’s Gospel, said to have been delivered in the last hour before Christ was arrested and tried, are rightly regarded as central to the Gospels. They are the one occasion when Jesus is recorded as having opened his heart to his disciples; and it is understandable that he should have waited until the very end before doing so. They are wonderful reading; but record many uncomfortable sayings. One of the things Jesus is supposed to have told his disciples was that they should be able to do all that he had done, and greater things still because he was returning to heaven. The fearful gulf between theory and practice today makes one wonder how much credence should be given to these sayings, and other claims like the resurrection.
The utter impotence of the clergy to heal anybody of anything stretches credulity to breaking point. They cannot understand that they must either admit in abject shame their impotence, or else be willing to re-interpret the Gospels and to suggest that this exhortation should rather be taken as an encouragement to attempt as much as one dare. In sermon after sermon throughout a lifetime, I have been told what Jesus said and did, and then been told to follow his example; but the clergy themselves dare not take this particular exhortation literally, even though it does not stand on its own. It is backed up by other sayings, which are just as uncompromising. They even pursue the quest of the historical Jesus, begun by Albert Schweitzer, imagining like the alchemists that this will somehow reveal the secret of life; whereas it may only reveal how distressingly Jesus was circumscribed by the limited and parochial thinking of the society in which he lived. The cardinal mistake of the Churches is that they will not lift their eyes to take in Creation as a whole, and then readjust or re-interpret their religion to fit in with what they see. In brutal theological language they are committing idolatry, by regarding theological dogma as inexorable truth, when at best it is only a profile of the truth. And everyone knows God has no truck with idolaters!
This distinction is something that a man accustomed to speaking with authority would regard as second nature. Having seen creation as a whole, he would not hesitate to readjust his ideas, secular and religious, to fit in with the way he and others were now looking at things. The clergy of the C.of E. seem incapable of doing this. They are imprisoned by the notion that Jesus is the answer to all their problems; and having piled anthropomorphic image on anthropomorphic image onto the Jesus that they have in their minds, they cannot let this image go. So faced with the distressing decline in numbers, they try to make the services more accessible by destroying the Liturgy, removing the pews, and destroying the solemnity. Convinced that something must be done, they feel a compulsion to do something; quite oblivious of the lack of logic, and lack of judgement involved.
Religion Rewritten, a religious view of nature and the universe.
Essay 4 - A Vocation To Re-Interpret Christianity.