We did a radio 4 broadcast from the cathedral a couple of weeks back and – as you would expect we were suitably irrelevant to the concerns of the church. We were celebrating John Locke, philosopher and Christian, great thinker on liberal democracy, long dead. The reason I mention him here is that central to his thought were both the search for truth AND for tolerance and the love of free enquiry. So he wasn’t splitting the world into feeble peacelovers on the one hand and strong adherents to principle on the other. Those characteristics could unite in one person or indeed in a nation or church.
But there is another point to make about Locke and about other great people of ideas. It is that his thinking surfaced at a particular moment in the 17th century. He was a child of his time. People don’t dismiss his great contribution because it belonged to a particular age. Batty ideas and wonderful ideas both arise in particular social contexts and can both be dismissed as mere responses to the spirit of the age. We have to judge whether they are right and true on other criteria. In other words, the origin of ideas and their validity are separable questions. Just by the way that means that my views should not be reduced to the fact that I like women (though I happen to) nor should the views of those opposed to women’s ordination be reduced to an assumption that they are women-haters. The validity of arguments should be treated separately from questions concerning their origin.
So to women and the episcopate. Here are some reasons for getting on with the decision. First and obvious, we have women priests and the practice has been impressive. Even if you don’t endorse the Gamaliel principle completely (Acts 4), in many respects our Church likes a kind of English pragmatism: what works? Women have proved to be good priests, many: excellent priests. At a different level of argument, women have civilized the clergy much as they have civilized Oxbridge colleges and other institutions that have become mixed. They have begun on the deans (tho there are one or two they still have to work on) and it’s high time that they moved on to the House of Bishops. Not that women have particular listable skills – those lists always disintegrate into farce. It is just that women are different.
Of course people say that bishops are distinct in kind from priests in that they (the bishops) are the main representatives of the church, and being in communion with the diocesan bishop is the means of being part of the church. The diocese is, in the traditional definition, the local church. But once it has been agreed that women can be priests, I cannot see that the argument about bishops is different in principle. Bishops are a different order of representative ministry, but the episcopate remains representative ministry.
Which leads me to headship. There is always the question in using the Bible of what we take as of temporary and what of eternal significance. Usury has come in as acceptable in spite of the bible, sacrifice and hat wearing have gone out, which is a great sadness (the hat wearing that is, not the sacrifice). Why? Well, each question has to be argued on good theological grounds: scripture, tradition, reason, experience. I think that the time came some time ago for a review of the thinking on headship (1 Timothy 2;8-15) in the light of other biblical passages and of experience. Doctrines develop. In the eyes of God there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, black nor white; those are truths that have taken us centuries fully to understand. Short of child-bearing and tossing the caber (putting the shot), neither men nor women should be classed as incapable. Leadership is a matter of skill and aptitude not gender.
Which brings me to Jesus as a man and the fact that he was surrounded in the main by men. I think that it is primarily for their humanity that Jesus and the apostles are understood and loved. The incarnation is to do with Jesus as a human being and the Chalcedonian and other theological definitions or understandings are about the salvation of humanity through the life, death and resurrection of a person who is both fully god and fully human. We are not saved by his gender but by him, by his divinity and humanity.
To proclaim that saving work in word and deed is our prime task. The saving work of Christ as primary, from which the church derives and which it serves, and then some way behind, the ministry of the church. The ministers of the church do not always look as if they were derivative of the church and serving it, but that is what they are. Ministry is a second order matter. Our time needs to be spent in a far more outward-looking way than it is at the moment and we need all the resources of women and men in the church to pursue our primary task. The world is full of strange spiritual happenings; there was a conference for 2000 witches (male and female) last week-end, which as you would expect was in Croydon. We have work to do in our post Christian and post atheist world.
I believe that with a good strong code of practice and some other arrangements to include as many as possible of those who disagree, we can and should have women bishops. But that is not actually the motion before us. It is that the process should begin and we will have to see how the discussion goes in the General Synod and in the church at large. The time at least for that is certainly ripe, maybe overdue. That is not a response to the spirit of the age, but a truth to be grasped. Doctrine develops. So I ask you to vote for the motion standing in my name.
