Quotation station

Three most popular services in national conscience: Service of nine lessons and Carols from Kings College, The Remembrance Service from Whitehall or the Royal Maundy on Maundy Thursday (where the Sovereign remembers the humblest of their subjects, fallen soldiers or elderly pensioners). 'At the heart of all these observances is the celebration of the divine humility.' David S. Stancliffe 'The Identity of Anglican Worship' p125

The church that allows itself to be narrated by modernity may for sometime be an attractive option insofar as its members will be able 'spiritually' to follow Jesus while giving over their bodies, their loyalties, and their money to the twin powers of state and market. But thus narrated, the church can only be but a private association of like-minded individuals who do not so much embody the truth as wear a brand name. By contrast, a postmodern and postliberal church may yet recover an evangelical and uncivil resistance to capitalism that originates in its worship and following of a crucified and risen Lord; is sustained by disciplines and practices such as the breaking of bread, the revolutionary love of enemies, and the welcoming of strangers; and is energised by the transforming, egalitarian and reconciling power of the Holy Spirit. Evangelism after Christendom, Stone p169

Whilst academics have been announcing the advent of 'post-modernity,' and professedly sounding the death knell of all hegemonic 'grand narratives,' global capitalism has insidiously established its power as perhaps the most rapacious grand narrative in the history of the West. Sarah Coakley Powers and Submissions 2002, p14 (intro)

Salvation in such a [individualistic] world is transformed into and essentially private, one-by-one affair, while evangelism becomes a practice based almost entirely on individual personality and persuasion, an attempt to lead individuals into a private decision to "have a personal relationship with Jesus“ or to join the church, much as one might join any other club or association. The modern Western model of church and salvation, especially in its Protestant forms (which are considerably more "modernised“ than Catholic or Orthodox forms), is largely predicated upon this narrative of the self. The church‘s evangelistic ministry becomes an expression of what McIntyre refers to as “bureaucratic individualism“ and entails the combination of rational technique and strategy, the creation of multiple programs to meet the needs of parishioners who will increasingly come to be viewed as customers or consumers, the tailoring of the gospel message to resonates with people‘s personal ex...

Having refused both religion as providing a public, shared justification for morality and the Aristotelian notion of a telos, however, Enlightenment thinkers deprived themselves of any justification for moving from human nature as we find it to human nature as it ought to be. All that is left behind is an inherited (but now baseless) content for morality along with human nature as we find it. But one can hardly argue from human nature as we find it (without a telos) to that moral content. On the contrary, “the injunctions of morality, thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey“. The project of enlightenment moral philosophers was doomed to failure. As McIntyre tells it, the story of the Enlightenment project is the story of what happens when human nature is deprived of its telos so that moral value judgements lose their factual character and can be taken as "nothing but expressions of preference.“ Emotivism as a theory is now free to hold sway. With no conception of what ...

McIntyre begins by asking why it is that contemporary moral debates (about abortion, war or homosexuality for example) are characterised by their interminablity and by their shrill tone. There never seems to be a resolution in such debates, the various positions within the debates appear to be incommensurable, and this leads to the widely held position in our culture that “all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling“ - a view McIntyre calls “emotivism.” Emotivists hold that there can be no rational or other grounds for making judgements among rival moral positions, so that all moral debate is essentially an exercise in rhetorical persuasion. So pervasive is this position that “to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture." Quoting A MacIntyre...

Like Jesus, Muhammad faced opposition to religious truth based on 'prestige and pride'. He, too, was rejected as an upstart, 'disruptive of the status quo... but there the similarity ends.' When Muhammad rode 'into prostrate Mecca' he 'clinched the submission of the tribes' by victory. Jesus in Jerusalem 'chose to refuse external patterns of success. They were within his reach and to his hand. He rejected them for the way of the cross.' A.K. Cragg The Call of the Minaret 1985 p 273-4