Daily Inspiration Quote by Roland Allen

Allen is doing something bracingly impolite for a clergyman: he calls a popular kind of church “orthodoxy” what it often is in practice - a system that contradicts its own stated God. The sentence turns on a hard, almost legal contrast: “their theory” versus “the spiritual fact.” He grants his opponents their premises (“those whom they admit to have the Spirit of Christ”) and then shows the absurdity that follows. If you can recognize Christ’s Spirit in someone and still bar them from communion, your boundary-policing isn’t fidelity; it’s bureaucracy.

The intent is reformist, but not mushy. Allen isn’t arguing for a vague inclusivity; he’s demanding intellectual honesty about what communion claims to be. Eucharistic exclusion, in his framing, isn’t merely harsh or uncharitable - it’s epistemologically incoherent. You can’t treat the Spirit as real when it flatters your theology and unreal when it threatens your control.

The subtext is institutional anxiety: churches often protect unity by tightening sacramental gates, especially across denominational lines. Allen, a missionary thinker shaped by the realities of global Christianity, had watched “the Church” export not just the gospel but Western ecclesial paperwork - credentials, permissions, and inherited quarrels. His jab lands because it targets a perennial temptation: to confuse safeguarding a tradition with safeguarding God.

Rhetorically, “flat contradiction” is a refusal to negotiate. It forces the reader to choose which authority actually rules: the lived evidence of Christ’s Spirit in people, or the theory that keeps the institution tidy.