David Ould: Anglican Under-Belief and Roman Over-Belief

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s official envoy to the Pope has been exposed by the Archbishop Cranmer blog as a blatant denier of Christ’s resurrection. The Revered David Ould is recorded saying:

The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality. It is important for Christians to be set free from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original earthly body.

Jesus’ early followers felt His presence after His death as strongly as if it were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection experience into their gospel accounts. But they’re not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives. Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.

The reverend gentleman is of course entitled to his opinions, though once upon a time, he would have been considered a non-believer rather than a Protestant denomination’s suitable ambassador. Such a man should have been sacked or quietly pensioned off. The hollow and malnourishing version of ‘Christianity’ that he represents offers little hope for a dying world.

Quite what the papacy will make of a man of such bland theology, one cannot tell. If Anglicanism bows at the altar of unbelief and rationalism, cutting away vital gospel truth from its creeds, the Church of Rome has gone the other way. Accepting all of scripture, it adds to it the apocrypha, papal teachings, church councils, saints’ opinions, natural and canon law. By relegating scripture to just one source of authority among many, the end result is the same- a compromised gospel and a false hope. So perhaps the anaemic Anglican liberal and his popish Roman hosts will have more in common than they first thought.

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. 1 Corinthians 15:14

Image by Steen Jepsen from Pixabay