An evangelical's journey to Orthodoxy
By Michael Harper
Hodder & Stoughton. 190 pages. £7.99
ISBN 0 340 67861
Michael Harper makes plain what it is in the Church of England that he is leaving. He is leaving The Myth of God Incarnate, the views of Maurice Wiles and Don Cuppitt and the Church of England Synod that passed the legislation about 'women priests'.
In a short review it is impossible to deal with all the detail, but I was left feeling that he has tried to give the Orthodox Church credit for too much. His basic defence of that church, of which he has joined the Antiochan branch, is that it has never needed to reform because it started off sound with the apostles and has not altered since. If it was bypassed by the Protestant reformation, it was also bypassed by the enlightenment. It is not a question of never needing reformation to a biblical ideal from which man so easily strays, but of . . . . .
