I find it hard to care about the blasphemy law, under which it is now, for good or ill, inconceivable that anyone could be prosecuted, never mind convicted. It strikes me as right up (or down) there with the hunting ban in terms of pointlessness. But it is not the ultimate target. That is the established status of the Church of England.
The established status of the Church of England (which is without parallel - nowhere else on earth is a church's very doctrine simply whatever the civil legislature says it is at any given time) has always been so objectionable to some people (Recusants, Puritans, Methodists, and others) that it actually brought about the emergence of the pluralism which, in turn, produced the clamour for successive extensions of the franchise, and of the power of the House of Commons over the Lords and the Crown.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries created a new ruling class dependent on State patronage for its vast wealth and otherwise hegemonic power. The late-twentieth-century dissolutions of other institutions have done the same thing.
What disestablishmentarians want is to establish the complete hegemony of that new ruling class, which happens to be thoroughly secular. Some of us still prefer pluralism and the mass participatory democracy that it created, and so should still prefer to see the Church of England established, simply to remind us why we are not in it.
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Surely "disestablishmentARians"?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, your strapline should now read "PRO-LIFE, PRO-FAMILY, PRO-WORKER, ANTI-WAR, ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIAN". It's got a ring to it.
Surely the Churches of Denmark and Norway are in the same position vis a vis the state?
ReplyDeleteAlso the Church of Sweden till 2000? From 1975 the supreme governor of the church was the Riksdag (Parliament) after King Carl Gustav was stripped of all his formal political powers such as giving royal assent and appointing ministers.
All the Scandanavian Churches due to the ego of reigning monarchs at the time of the reformation. Both kings of Denmark-Norway and Sweden became very interested in Protestantism as they wanted the cash from (Catholic) Church owned lands.
Monasteries were closed and church land was seized. Probably the most symbolic of these seizures was of the main Franciscan monastery in Stockholm which the Swedish monarchy turned into their Mausoleum - Riddakirksholmen - the Church of the Island of Knights.
Duly corrected, Peter. It's one of those words taht you know that the spell check will never recognise, so you just ignore its highlighting. And yes, it does have a ring to it, doesn't it? But it's probabaly a bit long.
ReplyDeleteIt has never been the case in Scandinavia (although the State Churches there, and historically in parts of Germany, have followed Luther to the letter and been subject to much more State regulation in practice than, say, the Church of England) that the very doctrine of the church could be altered by the civil power.
Scandinavian clergy avow themselves at ordination to the confessional documents of the German Reformation, which their respective civil powers did not make and cannot change; clergy of the Church of England avow themselves to the confessional documents of the English Reformation, which the Crown in Parliament made, and which the Crown in Parliament can (and periodically does) change.
It is probably because of this difference that, for example, the Church of Norway has more successfuly integrated a Pietist movement related (and connected) to Methodism, or the Church of Sweden retains a large High Church party even thsi long after the opening of all civil offices to women in the Seventies automatically compelled their ordination: both supporters and opponents of any of these phenomena can, and do, argue taht "well, the Confessions themselves have not been, and cannot be, changed."
(The growth of High Churchmanship was greatly assisted by the fact that, because there were no Catholics at all, nobody regarded these things as Popish. It will be interesting to see how long this lasts now that the secularisation of Scandinavia and its historic State Churches reaches what must surely be the final stage, right at the time when there is a significant Catholic revival going on there, centred on the traditional Latin Mass.)