I can accept that de Wesselow, though correct as I see it about the provenance and image of the Shroud itself, might pick, choose and invent his own fanciful theological theories. But I admit I was startled to read that Peter Stanford, a former editor of this august newspaper, harbours his own doubts. He writes, “The exact nature of the Resurrection troubles me as it does many Christians. Was it physical, against all the laws of nature but as the Church claims, or was it ‘symbolic’, as the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, famously suggested in 1984?”
Good grief, man. Don’t you yet realise that the whole point of God is that he is not bound by “the laws of nature”? And that although symbols perform a useful function for the human imagination they are not the real thing? (When the writer Mary McCarthy once described the Blessed Sacrament as just a “symbol”, a finer American writer, Flannery O’Conner, who was listening, responded, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”) Finally, who, outside woolly liberals, would ever give the time of day to the heretical and unedifying ramblings of the former Bishop of Durham on this subject?
