Facebook Debating

It's not my place to put here posts written by others, but I can represent my own point of view. There is a debate where my responses are also part of my view that an institution has a right to set (and monitor) its own boundaries.

A poster, who became a 'Facebook friend' and is ordained in the Anglican Church in New Zealand pointed approvingly to this:

James Mulholland speaks lots of good sense about this interesting journey of revising faith and meaning.
Religious Grief - Leaving Your Religion

For many, leaving religion can feel like the death of a loved one. When my religious faith ended, I recognized the stages of grief in that experience.

http://leavingyourreligion.com

Adrian Worsfold S - are you paid to represent the institution and what it stands for as is commonly understood within, without and by authority? Otherwise you could be accused of 'acting' when you do what the job demands when you don't understand it within its boundaries.

Adrian Worsfold It is a bureaucratic question. I'm sure the bishop will be clearer about a party line. In Derbyshire I was told about the Trinity, if I wanted to consider Anglican ministry, although the priest in my village called himself a 'religious humanist' and later on I was told there was a clear dividing line between someone who could maintain 'real absence' (acceptable) and 'non-realism' (unacceptable) because of the importance of maintaining theism in one form or another. But I was a non-realist with an anthropologist's approach to religion and ritual. But several other indications clearly meant I was 'outside'. I did not believe in Christ as the incarnation of God, nor did I believe in a resurrection in the sense that the person who died was the person who consciously met others after his death. Nor did I give much care for the Trinity as an expression - people give it all sorts of social definitions. It seems to me that if you don't uphold the incarnation and resurrection, and you want to be a bit Buddhist/ Hindu/ Pagan then you are outside, and ought to join a broader ministry from the institutional-representational point of view.

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Adrian Worsfold After all, it is a free choice today. You won't be persecuted for changing religion where you live or where I do.

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Adrian Worsfold I'm loathed to push this further because in the end employment is involved: however, the notion of 'comprehensive' doesn't mean as wide as you like and into all sorts of other things. It means, for Anglicans, a bit of Catholic, a nod to Lutherans, quite some Reformed, the Platonists and biblical critics. It's all within the broad credal boundaries, but even I'm allowing for creeds-light, that is to say pushing your luck on the Trinity, no demand on a tomb and that, nor virginity via the Holy Spirit - but yes to incarnation and resurrection as the glue to keep it stuck together, understood as a kind of pseudo-science and intervention into history.