Recently, I wrote about the Easter Message of the Dean of St George's Anglican Cathedral in Perth, in which he strongly asserted that the resurrection of Christ need not be understood as physical. I reported that I'd asked the Archbishop of Perth whether this was an acceptable view for a senior Anglican clergyman.

I appreciate the kind tone of Archbishop Herft's reply to me. One can only imagine how much correspondence an Archbishop must have to deal with. Presumably he received a number of letters expressing a similar concern. For this reason, I can partly understand that his reply appears to be a form letter.

My reason for thinking this is that his letter begins by saying that, “Journalists and newspaper editors, sadly, are not interested in reporting accurately on any subject”. Perhaps this is true of some journalists. But leaving aside this severe generalization, Herft goes on to imply that the problem in the current controversy is that we had a cynical junior reporter responding to deep matters of faith, and hence people reading the papers must have been misled.

It's fair enough to warn people against relying only on media sound bites! However my own letter to Archbishop Herft made it clear I had consulted both the video version of Dr Shepherd's Easter message and his full printed sermon notes made available on the Cathedral website. (Indeed, I did not read any media reports at all but heard about the issue from a colleague!) So it seems clear that Archbishop Herft did not closely read what I said at all.

He did not interact with my biblical critique of Dr Shepherd's words. Nor did he answer my specific questions about whether Dr Shepherd's views were in line with the Apostles' Creed (and hence §1 of the Fundamental Declarations of the Anglican Church of Australia) and Article 4 of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.

Archbishop Herft did indicate that he was considering the Dean's Easter message further with his Episcopal Team. One can only hope that I will receive a more specific answer then.

Archbishop Herft's own comments on the resurrection are a studied effort in covering every base. Herft affirms that Jesus' resurrection is “God's mightiest act” and it is bodily: his risen presence appears to us in a way we can comprehend, i.e. with “the marks of history”. So sometimes the disciples can “recognise him through his physicality”.

But then he says that at times the risen Jesus is “beyond time and space”. Possibly this is an allusion to Jesus' apparent post-resurrection supernatural ability to appear and disappear through walls, and so on. Yet it seems to imply something more. And to justify this suggestion that Jesus is beyond time and space, he simply cites 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-6:10 without further explanation. This leaves me uncertain of his meaning.

He also enclosed an article he wrote for his diocesan newspaper, the Anglican Messenger in March 2008, entitled ‘A Resurrection Faith—Analog or Digital?’ This article (which I could not find published online) traded on Paul Watzlawick's work on communication, describing human relationships as consisting of the digital (the verbal yes/no, true/false, it is here/not there, binary format) and the analogical (feelings, body movements, expressions in voice/facial gestures and silence) where both are needed.

Herft then suggests there “appears to be a strident movement in religious belief that parallels the movement in communication technology towards a digital only system where everything is reduced to a binary formula”. He claims that “The events surrounding the cross and resurrection lose their power in content, meaning and application when we fail to see the digital and analogical as complementary forces”.

I know of few evangelicals who would deny any importance to emotion and body language in communication (although some of us perhaps downplay them). However, I am at a loss to know what the “strident movement” towards binary only that Herft criticizes since he does not say. I fear it may be a shot against people like me who want a simple answer as to whether or not it's acceptable for a senior Anglican clergyman to deny that the resurrection of Christ is physical (as well as spiritual), even though that's what the Bible teaches and that's what our Anglican Thirty-nine Articles uphold as our standard of belief.

I don't think this is a hard question to resolve, although it might be unpalatable for his Bishop to have to admit it: judging from his own publicly available words, Dr Shepherd is contradicting the official doctrinal standards of the Anglican Church.

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