WHEN archbishops begin to think like Humpty Dumpty we know the Church is in trouble. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass we read, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

The Church of England in its latest report, Love Matters, commissioned by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and published last month, puts forward a vision of the future based on what it terms ‘love in action’, and for the archbishops love means something other than what it means in the Bible. It means ‘neither more nor less’ than acceptance and affirmation of that which the Bible terms sin.