Part One
I will talk about the priest and bishop as icons of Christ in worship. I will suggest that it is only the difference of men and women that enables their mutuality and complementarity and that these enable the creation of families, the arrival of children and so of a new generation. Only a society in which each generation can distinguish the roles of men and women’s roles can produce the new generation by which that society can continue. When the differences that enable mutuality are not observed that society dies out. It is not merely equality of the sexes that is required for the continuation of life but also difference and complementarity of the sexes, or in more familiar terms, love, service and patience. The society that demotivates its men, makes its women vulnerable, as we can now see.
Equality derives from the concept of rights. But the concept of rights cannot help us set out the gospel. Rights are used to replace concepts of love and service. The concept of rights brings us to a concept of self-determination and of human will without definition or limit, in conflict with nature and culture. Irrationality results from overreliance on the concept of equality.
Nothing says more clearly that the present hierarchy of the Church of England is not interested in remaining part of the Great Church, than when they put a woman forward for the office of bishop. (Poor woman. God be with her. Some manipulative and mischievous men have been at work here. I was once part of this mischief; I taught women on ordination courses and saw some of the fall out, and still see it all around. Happy the woman who gets out of the clergy without too much trauma)
Those who are responsible for this decision want to give us a bishop who never refers us to the long rich experience of the Church, who makes no reference to churches of other ages, who has no effective conception that the Church must inevitably stand against the demands of the moment. Such a person cannot function as a bishop because they are an advocate for the present against the future, demanding that we cut ourselves off from generations past and future. Such people are truly representatives and spokesmen of the global powers and ideologists who use the institutions of government to introduce an alternative morality that promotes the present over the future. They contrast what is old and what is new, and insist that we should replace what is old with what is new. But their lack of reading shows through, because they never realise that what they regard as new – for instance the absorption with sex and gender – is also very old. A wide variety of expressions and transgressions of sex and gender were just as much a part of life two thousand years ago as now. The Church knows them well because it grew up with them, and deliberately and rationally articulated its teaching on the relationships of men and women dialogue with them and in controversies against them. The Church that is still in possession of its memory must say that these old issues have acquired no new validity just because they have come to the attention of our present decision-makers for the first time.
The attempt to put a woman into the role of bishop comes from the belief that equality is more fundamental than any of the other concept in the Christian understanding of the world. The implicit claim is that the gospel can be reduced to this agenda, and that the ultimate injustice, the lack of equality between the sexes, can then be resolved. To help to bring inequality to an end, the powers that be want to see women in every role. They are therefore determined to brush aside all consideration of proper difference and complementarity, or of the waiting and self-control that are required for all roles and relationships. The secular powers are therefore opposed to the Church which necessarily waits, debates and must usually decide against whatever the current secular orthodoxy is. The powers do not want to the Church to function as a countervailing power, a rival authority and source of dissent. Those who are ashamed of the distinct and unchanging position of the Church on public issues, and who are convinced that the Church must simply be pushed into conformity are unsurprisingly helped up into positions of power by their secular allies. The Church often has to suffer bishops and other clergy who have been propelled into high office in the Church because of their malleability and readiness to return favours, who are government placemen and Church-hating secular fellow travellers. That is why we must always pray for our bishops and for all our clergy, beseeching God to have mercy on them and on us.
