He also constantly related his faith in a triune God of love to the God revealed in the Bible he only insisted that “the God of the Bible is not shut up in the Bible.”įor Dr Jenkins, “the gift of biblical faith in the living God” was about facing up to reality - a reality of our past, present, and future, which God is most certainly involved in and active through. Viewed with dispassion, his time as Bishop of Durham throws up several challenging lessons for Evangelicals today.įOR someone dubbed the “Bishop of Blasphemy” by the tabloid media, Dr Jenkins wrote an extraordinary amount about God in conventional Trinitarian terms. I write this not out of any party allegiance to the wing of the Church which Dr Jenkins represented, but as a young Open Evangelical, who dipped into Dr Jenkins’s theology out of curiosity, and found it nothing like his rumoured reputation. This response is a pity, and the future Church will be poorer, the longer it persists. ![]() But now that Evangelical opinions and priorities appear safely back in the ascendancy in the Church - indeed, in much of the episcopate - there is perhaps a collective sigh of quiet relief going round: “We’ll not see his like again.” ![]() For an older generation, he epitomised the dangers of theological liberalism in the Church hierarchy - supposedly squandering the potential of his public platform to sow seeds of doubt, and not faith.įor a younger generation, his name - if people have heard it at all - is one of several shorthands for how the Church of England lost the plot in the 1980s. THE passing of Dr David Jenkins, a former Bishop of Durham, will be greeted with mixed emotions by many Evangelical Anglicans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |