It has been clear for several years that the Church of England’s synod wanted to ordain women as bishops.
But that left a critical question – what concessions should be made to traditionalists who objected?
During a long weekend of impassioned and sometimes emotional debate, it decided that the concessions being sought came at too high a cost.
I welcome this piece by the BBC’s regular religion correspondent, Robert Pigott, because it exposes many of the crucial faultlines so well. That is, it aptly summarizes what some of the key issues are, even if it implicitly seems to give the wrong answers. In the end, I think it’s all about what kind of relationship with the wider society the CoE leaders choose to have (within the very limited options available to them as a small minority within an increasingly pagan and hostile culture).
Thus, Pigott observes that the General Synod actions were “[i]driven partly by the fear that its attitudes were dangerously out of step with wider society.[/i]” However, he implies that it would be a bad thing if the CoE were actually to fall so far “out of step” with secular society. I submit that this is by no means the case.
Similarly, Canon R. Cotton protests that it would be a disaster for the CoE to “turn into a [b]sect[/b].” And likewise, the former MP Robert Key warns that the CoE stands in grave danger of that most horrible of catastrophes, i.e., that it could become “a dwindling [b]sect[/b],” again implying that “sect” is an intolerable, obscene four-letter word. Now I know that British usage is sometimes quite different from American usage, but I have to confess my dismay that such obsolete notions still persist and are apparently influential across the Pond. We simply have to get over that inherited notion that a “sect” is always, invariably, a horrible, awful, no good, very bad thing.
Of course, I’m glad that evangelical hero +NT Wright strongly opposed Mr. Keys, stating courageously, “[i]when the Church started (sic!) to follow the dictates of contemporary society, it ‘would cease to be the Church.[/i]'” Well, naturally, Bishop Wright is right, as far as he goes. But, as you’d expect, I find it rather amusing that the good bishop of Durham seems to imply that the CoE has YET to start following that unacceptably compromising course.
Good grief, what else do state churches do? By their very nature, they have “followed the dictates of contemporary society” for centuries, and they seldom have the strength to “let the Church be the Church, come what may.” That’s the whole problem in a nutshell. But as I like to say, when I get up on my soapbox from time to time, “[i]the only thing worse than a state church is an ex-state church that still pretends to be a state church.[/i]” Or an ex-state church that simply can’t imagine any other way of operating than as an established church wanna be.
That is my biggest pet pieve with the CoE. Admittedly, I hate its tendency to compromise and conform to the world, time after time (contra Romans 12:2; 1 John 2:15-17 etc.). Alas, the CoE ceased to bear any resemblance to a pure Church a long time ago, taking refuge in Augustine’s notion of a “mixed body” as leaving the wheat to grow among the tares until the end of time. But the stresses and strains now so evident in the life of the CoE show all too clearly that the familiar old Christendom, established church relationship is plainly obsolete and unworkable these days. Why? Simply because the powers that be no longer want to continue the farce. Secular leaders want out of the marriage.
Let’s face facts. Practicing Anglicans are a tiny minority of the English population. What once truly was the Church of England is now in reality the Church of a miniscule and shrinking minority of England. And that pathetic course of declining numbers and influence will only increase as long as the leaders of the CoE continue to try to prop up the old unworkable model that has gone the way of the Dodo Bird and the Brontosaurus. The Christendom era is over; a new and exciting post-Christendom era stands before us, with all its thrilling opportunities of recapturing much of the dynamic strength of the pre-Constantinian Church. When the Church was indeed a sect in the old pagan Roman Empire, and appropriately proud of it.
There is all the difference in the world between the unhealthy Protestant sectarianism of say Thomas Munster and his Anabaptist millenarian fanatics in Germany in the 1520s and the healthy, robust Catholic sectarianism of Irenaeus, Cyprian and the Great Church before Constantine and Theodosius.
This article thus highlights the crucial underlying issue and poses the essential question, how will the CoE relate to an increasingly unbelieving, cynical, indifferent or even hostile society? To be OF the world or AGAINST the world (for the sake of the world), that is the question. Unfortunately, journalist Pigott’s article reflects almost no comprehension of the radical depth of the dilemma the Church faces, and therefore no awareness of how radical the solution must be.
David Handy+
Unashamedly sectarian (in a catholic way), and proud of it
You might think that the issue of provision for traditional Anglicans in the CofE is what this is all about. I am of the view that the issue is, in fact, about what lead and influence the Church of England will have on the future of the overwhelmingly faithful and more tolerant Global South majority Anglican Communion.
On both counts it has failed, but it is too myopic to see that.
Well written.
What does itmean? It means that the ABC will soon be a woman. L