Clergyman Gives Up Licence

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 1

Clergyman Gives Up Licence

A Christchurch Anglican clergyman has relinquished his licence as an officiating minister because he feels that his beliefs are incompatible with being an active clergyman.

The Rev. J. C. Thornton, who has been a lecturer in the philosophy department of the University of Canterbury for six years, said yesterday that he felt it was irresponsible for him to hold the Bishop of Christchurch’s licence to officiate as a minister when his personal beliefs in God differed greatly from

.what ordinary people believed.

Although he has not been engaged in pastoral work for the last six years, Mr Thornton, because he holds a licence to officiate, has been invited to preach. Mr Thornton said he no longer believed in a supreme supernatural being “in a straight-forward way.” He had been led to this through his work in philosophy and. as an academic, he felt he must follow the argument whenever it led.

While there was a very broad tolerance of theological views within the Anglican Church and, on the whole, senior clergy in Christchurch

said they did not want him to give up his licence, he felt he had gone too far, and it was difficult for him to continue calling himself a minister.

“The person in the pew has the right to assume that the clergyman leading public worship believes what the language suggests. The central belief implied by the language is that there is a supreme supernatural being listening to the prayers. This is what 1 no longer hold.”

Mr Thornton said that he did not think that public worship was a waste of time or completely erroneous. He saw the function of religious i belief as being primarily for

expressing people’s moral values, and focusing for them moral and social convictions in a helpful, fundamental and useful way. He could not think of any organisation, other than the Church, which could perform this function in a corporate situation. He said that he had not rejected the whole range of beliefs that Christians hold, and he left it to others to decide whether he is a Christian. Mr Thornton was ordained in 1954 and, according to the rules of the Anglican Church, remains a minister. He may apply for a licence in future to officiate as a clergyman if he wishes.