Mr. Ivor Bulmer Thomas of London did not care much for the message of the world Anglican Congress held last summer in Toronto and rudely said so in the Church Assembly at Westminster when a bishop formally moved that the message be commended. Full of pious clichés, scoffed Mr. Bulmer Thomas, heaping “inanity upon inanity.” He had other objections too, and he put them together in an amendment which, according to the workings of the Church of England, had to be voted on by the three houses separately. The clergy carried his amendment easily, the laity more narrowly, but it was vetoed by the House of Bishops (from which no voting figures were supplied).
A hardy annual reappeared when an archdeacon raised the question of the church commissioners whose income from extensive property interests often brought the accusation of “dirty money.” A bishop rose and said that such lies should be nailed—the commissioners did not grind the faces of the poor as was popularly supposed; to say so was virtually an attack on the church itself.
Another familiar scene was re-enacted in the House of Laity when the evangelicals sought once more to remove all barriers between Christian people at the Lord’s Table. The strictures of the 1604 canons, pointed out Mrs. C. Tebbutt of Peterborough, were aimed against notorious evil livers and schismatics, not against fellow Christians; by its vote the house would stand in the judgment of history and of God. Another lady cited an appalling situation where an Anglican incumbent was compelled to turn away his own father from Communion because the latter was a Baptist minister. The suggested amendment foundered on the rock of the legal point that only those confirmed “or ready to be confirmed” were to be admitted, but the voting (95 to 72) indicated a less rigid attitude on this point.
The assembly resumed discussion of proposals which would set up in the Church of England a general synod to unite the separate legislative bodies. The chief effect of this would be to give laymen, for the first time in the church’s history, a voice in making decisions about the worship and teaching of the church. Evidence suggests that the bishops are generally in favor of this, but that the clergy have grave doubts. A commission has been proposed to work out details.
Ecumenical Etiquette
The high hopes expressed for the Church of England-Methodist merger report (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, March 15, 1963), are described by a prominent English evangelical merely as “the hyperboles of ecumenical etiquette.” Dr. J. I. Packer goes on to say that both churches have dwindled considerably during this century, and that neither is noted for either soundness of doctrine or sanctity of life. To expect that reunion would invigorate them is “to expect two consumptives to get better simply through getting married.”
Packer was contributing to a paperback symposium (published last month by the Marcham Manor Press) in which six Anglicans give “a straightforward biblical evaluation of the Report.” Packer, who also edits the essays, agrees that it is a Christian duty to seek reunion, because denominationalism is anomalous by biblical standards. Nevertheless, the quest for unity must not be divorced from the quest for truth and holiness, he went on, and must be conceived as a quest to be reformed by the Word of God.
Paulus Ex Machina
With the aid of a Mercury computer and half a million words of Greek prose, a Scottish minister-mathematician believes he has proved conclusively that Paul wrote only five of the Epistles attributed to him.
Andrew Queen Morton, who serves the historic Church of Scotland parish of Culross, collaborated with New Testament professor G. H. C. Macgregor (who died last July) in examining the view that an author could be identified by word-patterns and ingrained habits of style. After detailed investigations they discovered that five of the allegedly Pauline Epistles were indistinguishable: Romans, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, and Philemon. These were accepted as genuine on the basis that no one has ever challenged the view that Paul wrote Galatians. (One scholar remarked that this was unscientific, and that for many centuries no one had ever challenged the view that the earth was flat.) The nine other Epistles, concluded Macgregor and Morton, emanated from at least five other hands.
Outlining these findings in The Observer, Morton claims that the greatest consequence of all this is to “cut the ground from under any notion of absolute religious authority—whether this is expressed as Church or Bible.” He is at great pains to illustrate the “inertia and opposition” encountered from fellow theologians, and criticizes by name three of Scotland’s best-known New Testament professors and two of the country’s most respected, religious journals which failed to publish material submitted to them. Roman Catholics and fundamentalists are also indicted in his article, which is written with all the arrogant assurance of the lawyer who has hit upon a winning case. “Theologians all over the Christian world have now to face the implications of this discovery,” he claims.
Theologians in Britain have been slow to take the hint, although many of them have known of Morton and his work for some time. The Bishop of Woolwich. Dr. John Robinson, condemned as unscientific the statement that “all that needs to be done is to discover some unconscious literary habits,” and ridiculed the idea of absolute religious authority trembling before the computer. Father Thomas Corbishley, S. J., points out that his church accepts the teaching of the Bible not because of the writer or writers, but because of the divine inspiration operating through whomever the human author may have been. Said one prominent evangelical scholar: “It seems to me a computer can only tell infallibly what a computer would write, and that it would be even less successful in charting an apostle than an ordinary man. A computer doesn’t even have brains enough to be unregenerate.” Scholars who have examined this kind of approach in the past have generally agreed that Paul is too big a man to be squeezed into a statistical straitjacket.
Morton is currently in North America, lecturing and demonstrating his $2,250 machine. He said that only in Chicago was a theologian interested: elsewhere his hosts have been linguists and scientists.
J. D. DOUGLAS
