Today we are witnessing a huge controversy
in the Anglican Church.
It's all about what the American Anglicans
that is the Epsicoplian Church - can and can't
do within the worldwide Anglican communion.
They decided over recent years to totally
accept the LGBT people and ordain bishops
who identify with that community or spring from it.
Conservative Anglican leaders elsewhere are
morally outraged.
They argue that homosexuality is a sin and
that the Bible expressly forbids it.
And that's the heart of the matter. Is the
Bible always right? Is it inerrant?
Conservatives fear that if you give an inch
the opposition will take a mile.
The only true position for the conservative
Christian is to both conserve and preserve Biblical
truth against all-comers.
So, it's an unedifying but hardly unexpected display
of ecclesial power politics on the international
stage at present.
But about 150 years ago an equally huge controversy
erupted around the very same thing, Biblical truth.
Back then it affected not just Anglicans
but every religious denomination,
although the Anglicans, I have to say,  made a bit of a feast of it,
just as they are doing today.
The controversy was the new science versus
the old religions.
Did Charles Darwin's theory of evolution destroy
Christianity?
Some people believed it did.
They argued that Darwin's theory proved the
Biblical account of creation was just plain
wrong.
The book of Genesis was merely a childish
myth that explained nothing about the actual
origins of life on this planet.
When Darwin published the Origin of Species
in 1859, that was the beginning of the end
for Christianity, or so the argument went
back then.
Show one part of the Bible to be wrong and
suspicion would naturally arise that all of
it could be wrong.
It is a fact that Darwin's book caused a huge
storm of controversy on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Many thoughtful Christianswere outraged by
it.
Some went all out to prove the literal truth
of the Genesis account of creation.
The controversy flared on and off for decades,
but it always revolved around that one key concept,
what was Biblical truth.
Yet it wasn't Darwin's Origin of Species which
really inflamed the situation.
It was a book that hardly anyone today has
heard of, apart from a specialist religious
audience.
It was called Essays and Reviews, and it convulsed Christendom
according to Benjamin Disraeli.
It consists of academic essays on various
aspects of theology, and each one implied the
Bible wasn't true in a literal sense.
Well, Disraeli was right. It did cause a furore.
23 of the 26 English Bishops condemned it.
11,000 clergymen put their signatures to a
formula which declared that the Bible was
the literal Word of God, divinely inspired.
And 137,000 laymen - in a letter - congratulated
the English bishops on their stand for Christian
truth.
All to no avail in the long run.
Like the African bishops today and their supporters
around the world, the plain truth is not
to their liking.
The Bible is a human book, and very fallible.
Which leads us not to Nowhere but to Erewhon.
While Christendom convulsed itself over what
to make of the Bible
and what to make of Darwin,
something was happening in the remote - ah
- reaches of the Upper Rangitata River,
at the end of the earth: New Zealand
It is both curious and significant that one
of the most trenchant and popular critiques
of both faith and science emerges here.
This is as remote from the great centres of
trans-Atlantic learning as could possibly
be imagined.
On the steep high country hills of nowhere,
Samuel Butler's Erewhon was first conceived.
And during the early 1860s a little flurry
correspondence, signalling something, in the
fledgling newspaper the Christchurch Press
about the reception of Darwin's ideas.
The full story of Samuel Butler will be told
elsewhere in the kiwiconnexion.nz website.
Although he was the son of an Anglican priest
and even considered that as a vocation - he trained
as a curate for a while, he eventually rejected
it.
His rise to fame as the last of the great
Victorians came as a result not only of turning
his back on Christianity,
but also because of a famous swingeing attack
on Darwinism through a series of books,
along with his extraordinary talent as a painter
and photographer.
Next time we will look at the reception of
Darwinism in Christchurch and further clashes
in this emerging war of myths.
In the meantime, the Primates of the Church
of England seem not to know what they are
doing.
Maybe nothing much has really changed in church
during the last 150 years.
That's a worrying thought.
See you next time and thanks for watching.
