The
Modern Churchpeople's Union
Modern Believing 48:4 October 2007
Books Reviewed - each link will take you to Amazon
William E. Phipps,
Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage. London: Continuum, 2006. Pp. x, 272. £10.99.
Reviewed by Thomas O'Loughlin
The Roman Catholic Church has, in the period since the Reformation, developed a pastoral theology and spirituality, which, whatever its intrinsic merits, is heavily dependent on ordained ministry. The suitably clad cleric has indeed become an icon of the denomination; and that cleric is without a wife. In theory, this is a supremely dedicated, hierarchically consecrated, and pastorally disposable workforce; in practice it has often been lonely men, in dysfunctional social situations, promoting a vision of Christian living that is a by-product of the demands of this style of priesthood.
Clive Pearson, Allan Davidson and Peter Lineham,
Scholarship and Fierce Integrity: Henry D. A. Major, The Face of Anglican Modernism. Auckland: Polygraphia, 2006. Pp. 245. $NZ 48.
Reviewed by Paul Badham
Henry Major edited The Modern Churchman for 46 years. For most of that period he was Vice-Principal and then Principal of Ripon Hall, and he did indeed come to be seen as ‘the face of Anglican Modernism'. This book gives a new perspective on Major's life because it traces his educational and theological development in New Zealand prior to his move to Oxford in 1903. It places his work in the context of the life of the New Zealand Church and tells the story of the fierce opposition he encountered on his only return visit to the land of his upbringing. The book makes effective use of a recently discovered notebook in which Major reminisced about his early life. This notebook, massively annotated by the editors, provides a significant new slant on the formative influences on Major's development.
Jack Rogers,
Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. Pp.169. £8.92.
Edited by Duncan Dormer and Jeremy Morris,
An Acceptable Sacrifice? Homosexuality and the Church. London: SPCK, 2007. Pp.179. £12.99.
Giles Fraser,
Christianity with Attitude. Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 2007. Pp.176. £9.99.
Reviewed by Robert Thompson
Much media coverage of religious issues tends to resort to using the simplistic categories of ‘liberal' and ‘conservative'. This is very much the case in presentations of the ‘debate' in the Anglican Communion on issues of human sexuality. This crude dualistic reductionism masks a more complex contemporary theological reality in which positions formed on any particular issue have a much more varied provenance. This is very much exemplified by these three recent publications.
John Rogers, of ‘conservative' evangelical stock (p.6; also John Rogers, Confessions of a Conservative Evangelical , 2002), is a former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) who writes with the desire that his own denomination's wounds of division over human sexuality should be healed. ...
In contrast the offering of a set of generally ‘liberally' minded Cambridge based Church of England theologians to the current sexuality ‘debate' in an Anglican context: An Acceptable Sacrifice? Homosexuality and the Church is thoroughly disappointing.
Real bodies are, however, the primary subject for theological reflection on virtually every page of Giles Fraser's Christianity with Attitude. This book gathers together some of Fraser's best journalistic contributions to The Church Times , The Guardian and Thought for the Day and rearranges them in thematically. There are sections covering the liturgical year, death, the ‘bloody church', fundamentalism, sex and individualism. What is impressive about Fraser's journalism is that, for the most part, he makes passionate, insightful and memorable theological points which combine the personal, the philosophical and the political without resorting to trite sound bites.