The Bishops' Boot: The Church of England's Most Conservative Cleric Is Being Forcibly Retired.
Dec. 17, 2011
Dr. Peter Mullen is being forcibly retired by the hierarchy. He is too old, you see: three score and ten, as the King James translators phrased it (Psalm 90:10).
If you believe that age is the cause, I've got a bridge in London to sell you. (Actually, it's in Arizona.)
Dr. Mullen is by far the most outspoken conservative cleric in the Church of England -- or maybe in all the British Isles. He says politically incorrect things about gays, Muslims, and (for all I know) gay Muslims. He opposes Great Britain's participation in the European Union. He wrote the following:
The labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nightmare of EU procedures is one monstrous lie. And upon this lie, all other lies are constructed like some modern version of the Tower of Babel. The lie that people of Europe have democracy, when actually we are all dominated by the diktats of a corrupt and self-serving elite. The lie that we shall have a say in governance of our continent, when actually all the plebiscites and referenda which go against the wishes of the lying elite are cancelled or re-jigged until they produce the required result. The lie that the business of the super-state is being conducted efficiently and honestly when, in reality, it is a continental bureaucracy run on a system of bribes, with proper accounts neither produced nor audited for decades.
But what really gets the hierarchy's goat is what he says about them. In 2009, he wrote this:
What has actually happened over these last forty years is that the church has embraced the secular agenda: the so-called progressive sexual and social policies, feminism, anti-sexism, anti-racism, idealistic internationalism and the dogma of universal human rights. The Church of England effectually resigned. As T.E. Hulme said, No institution is ever defeated until it is penetrated by the ideas of its enemies. The church has been so penetrated. We have imbibed the notions and policies of the secularists whose consistently declared aim is the obliteration of Christianity from public life.One interesting sidelight on all this is that the modernising bishops of the 1960s and 70s were engaged in enthusiastic negotiations for unity with Rome. But when it became a choice between that unity and ordaining women to the priesthood, feminism triumphed over ecumenism and the so-earnest, so-sincere, talks with Rome were at an end. This was the key moment in the secularisation of the Church of England. The contemporary secular commitment to anti-sexism trumped the authority of ecclesiastical order.
Our church is now governed by the theological and liturgical iconoclasts, by people who, in the traditional sense, are really unbelieving: feminised multiculturalists who see the Christianity they promised at their appointment to defend as an impediment to that supposed wider understanding based on the contradictory alliance between world religions and secular humanism. Any traditionalist in today's dumbed-down, traduced, secular and faithless church will be persecuted by the apostate hierarchy which now rules us.
He was just getting warmed up. On September 27, 2011, he wrote this:
One should be wary of overestimating the intelligence of the bishops. They fall for every trendy trick that's going. In the1960s it was CND when they argued for unilateral nuclear disarmament- forgetting that the only nation which had ever suffered nuclear attack was Japan, which nation did not, of course, possess the bomb. Then it was liberation theology, otherwise known as supporting communist revolutionaries in South America. Are you, like me, old enough to remember the Church of England's Christmas advertisement picturing Jesus as Che Guevara? "Liberation theology"? Do you remember your Orwell? "Liberation is slavery. Truth is Lies."Then in the 1980s, because of course, they hated Margaret Thatcher, they composed one of the most specious and illiterate documents of all time called "Faith in the City."
They supported the ANC against such democratic forces as were trying to emerge in South Africa. And naturally, they were in favour of that renowned democrat and egalitarian Robert Mugabe who turns out to be a tyrant and mass murderer, the very ruination of his country -- which used to be the breadbasket of Africa but which is now the centre of starvation and mass murder
The thing about the Church of England -- I don't mean the ordinary, sane people in the pews, but the insane and vastly uneducated ideologues who actually run the church, Bishops, Synods and the like -- is that in the name of the gospel it consistently defends the latest claptrap as divine revelation.
You might say the Church of England always follows secular fashion only, like some Prince Consort, one dutiful pace behind.
So now we priests in the Church are encouraged, nay browbeaten and threatened, to subscribe to the greatest financial scam to inflict itself upon the national consciousness since the South Seas Island Bubble. I mean, of course, the fantasy of global warming. The church has swallowed whole the spurious (but of course, politically correct) propaganda in favour of this drivel. So now we have, as it were, not Directors of Mission -- God forbid we should think alien religions were in any way inferior! -- but Archdeacons for low energy light-bulbs and Area Deans for carbon footprint.
What does it say for the mind of the Church that it should be so taken in by this rubbish? I thought we were called to be prophetic, standing out against the trend. of following the corrupt and fanciful anti-intellectualism of our times in a mood of what can only be described as corrupt and faithless sentimentality
The bishops and synodsmen, the hierarchy which presumes to govern us, is intellectually vacuous, senile and entirely captured by -- what it ought prophetically to oppose -- the spirit of a debauched and decadent age.
He has their number. The bishops are, in the marvelous phrase of Paul Seabury, trendier than thou. So, the hierarchy wants him out of the pulpit. It has found a way. He turns 70 in January. One must not have a doddering old man in the pulpit. As everyone knows, no man that old could possibly pursue his calling in the ministry, even at his parishioners' request (which Mullen has). So, off he goes! It's shuffleboard for him! Maybe a little bingo from time to time, if he feels up to the excitement.
Mullen is right. The bishops aren't too bright. The wise way would be to do what the liberals in the Presbyterian Church USA did after their take-over in 1936. They let the geezers alone. They let the old men grow older and die. (I have written a book on their strategy.)
But the bishops cannot resist. They just have to extend to him the right boot of fellowship.
I hope he finds a parish to take him in and give him another decade to express his views. As Moses said, "and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away" (Ps. 90:10b). But, before he flies away, maybe he can target a few more choice droppings on the heads of the hierarchy.