Posted on 01/03/2005 8:14:55 AM PST by sionnsar
​​​​LONDON (1/3/2005)--Lambeth Palace has objected to a headline in the first edition of yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, which read: "Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God". The headline, said a spokesman for Dr Rowan Williams, was a "misrepresentation of the archbishop's views" on the Asian tsunami disaster, as he had expressed them in the paper.
We have some sympathy with the archbishop. Those who had time on their hands to read his article several times over will realise that he was not in fact doubting the existence of God. The headline writer had clearly been misled by the sentence: "Every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers."
The archbishop's purpose here, it now appears, was to say that the Christian faith should not be upset by natural disasters, because it is a faith that is not "bound up with comfort and ready answers". But what a convoluted way of putting it.
If Dr Williams was indeed misrepresented by our sister paper's headline, he himself must accept much of the blame. His prose is so obscure, his thought processes so hard to follow, that his message is often unclear.
What, for example, is the lay reader to make of the following passage from his article? "They [believers] have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift; they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God's mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence.
These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease, but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart."
If Dr Williams hopes to teach and inspire his flock, he really must learn to express himself more clearly. Otherwise he will be forever doomed to be the victim of his own erudition.
When you read the entire communication that the ABC wrote, you realize that he was trying to say why one's faith shouldn't be shaken by what happened. The problem is that you can't write an article on that kind of topic for general dissemination like you were writing an academic journal article.
The theology of this article seems sound to me, but it's not enough for the ABC to be a theologian. There's plenty of those. He needs to communicate and lead, and this was not an effective effort by those criteria.
Apparently this press is acting a bit like Dan Rather: they have a vendetta and an agenda.
If ABC didn't say that 'all Christians should now question the existence of God' then he was entirely impugned and a few writers should apologize for doing that, not make excuses.
quote, 'If Dr Williams hopes to teach and inspire his flock, he really must learn to express himself more clearly. Otherwise he will be forever doomed to be the victim of his own erudition.'
Oh, and also, Dr Williams needs to be either hot or cold. Otherwise he will be forever doomed to having been spit from the Lord God's mouth.
Revelation 3:16
16So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%203;&version=50;
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