I attend an Anglican Church that experienced what, in the 1980s, we called “renewal”. We acknowledged the presence and activity of the third person of the Trinity in worship, practised the gifts of the Holy Spirit and were viewed by the sober apparatchiks of the Diocese of Niagara as loony fundamentalists. We didn’t particularly care, since we ignored the diocese and they ignored us – unless they were running short of cash. All that was to change in 2008 when we joined ANiC – except for the diocese’s voracious appetite for Mammon to pay its lawyers.

But I digress. In the 1980s no respectable Anglican wanted anything to do with the Holy Spirit: his presence brought change, chaos, mayhem and, well, people who knew what they believed and took Christianity seriously – and that will never do in a church that is preoccupied with embracing “uncertainties, our fears, our doubts and the many challenges raised by scientific insights.”

In those halcyon days, any self-respecting bishop was constitutionally incapable of saying “Holy Spirit” – outside of the sterilising setting of liturgy – without having an attack of the vapours. Sadly, those times are gone and now the Canadian bishop does not exist who is not prosecuting some ploddingly dull or extravagantly heretical plan or other at the behest of the “spirit”, using the word as a justifying incantation at every opportunity. That this is a bogus “spirit” goes without saying. After all, the third Person of the Trinity is eternal and of one substance with the Father (come to think of it, Anglican bishops don’t even believe in the Father); the irritatingly ubiquitous phantasma, apparitions, bishops’ familiars are spirits of another kind.

In the worthy missive of the Diocese of New Westminster, we are told that there is only a “Holy Spirit” in order to foster “diversity”. If we could be just a little more diverse of our own accord, this particular spirit – the diversity-coach spirit – would not have been needed and presumably not created (page 2):

Commenting on our life together in the unity of the Spirit, Charleston asked “Why is there a Holy Spirit?” “Because God knew we would never agree and gives us comfort, guidance and wisdom to supply what the human family of God needs in conflict — the ability to live together in our very real diversity.”

The same article tells us that the church has moved from the “Age of Faith” to the “Age of Belief” into the “Age of the Spirit”; indeed it has, but it would be more accurate to say the “Age of the Zeitgeist”.