Peter,

I enjoy your writing style, but your articulation smothers your presuppositions. In this short piece, you tried to 'trick' us into believing Darwin's view of the origin of the universe was correct, affirmed by cosmologists. You might learn that in your liberal Anglican theological college but it takes more than a few sentences to unpack and then refute.

Then you want us to swallow your line that the veracity of the biblical texts would have been supported if we followed the Wellhausen research, Source Criticism (SC), of 1878. When will you get it? The Graf-Wellhausen SC Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP for authorship of the Pentateuch) has been refuted over and over but your liberal theology keeps on keeping on.

There is internal evidence in the Pentateuch to demonstrate Mosaic authorship and not the 4-source Graf-Wellhausen theory. Space does not permit my going into these, except to say that a serious fallacy of the Hypothesis is that it assumes no part of the Torah was written before the middle of the 9th century BC. This would be the time of the Exile of the Israelites. This flies in the face of archaeological evidence of the last century.

If you continue to promote this kind of theology in your diocese, don't expect people to flock to your churches. Your views cause people to doubt the authority of Scripture. For a better assessment, I think it's time for you to engage in discussions with the faculty of Moore College, Sydney, and examine how the Sydney diocese is preventing the kind of decline of your churches.

Yep.
It’s unknown to me if liberalism came as a consequence of the decline of Christian religious attachment, or whether it precipitated the decline.

Dan

From my observations, Christianity or rather the behaviour of many Christians has caused its decline.
Progressives parading as Christians have exploited the good will & forgiveness factor of Christianity & ruined it for all.

Dan,

<<It’s unknown to me if liberalism came as a consequence of the decline of Christian religious attachment, or whether it precipitated the decline.>>

It's time for you to do some serious research.

See: 'Albert Mohler: Theological liberalism is not Christianity', http://decisionmagazine.com/albert-mohler-theological-liberalism-is-not-christianity/

One of the assessments by Mohler is: 'With theological liberalism, the world is happy and Christians starve. And eventually, the world ignores you and Christians leave. Look at the liberal denominations. They’re being abandoned. They’re plotting their own extinction. Look at how many of the denominations that have gone liberal are now just barely skeletons of what had existed before.

'We need to recognize that theological liberalism is the message of theological death. And there were those who saw this when the liberals first started teaching and preaching—orthodox Christians who understood that theological liberalism was not a new form of Christianity; it was an entirely new religion claiming to be Christianity'.

So, theological liberalism comes first and that leads to spiritual death. Dr Gresham Machen has documented how this happened at Princeton Theological Seminary in Christianity and Liberalism (now public domain) at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Liberalism.