What is a bishop?
A bishop is the discipline of the whole Church on us – which is nothing other than the Lordship of Christ effective for us – packaged in the form of one person. The bishop represents, and makes available to us, the discipline of all other parts of the Church – geographically, historically, eschatologically. The bishop is the whole Church in one person. We can go and complain to him, seek explanations from him, and we also have to encourage and to pray for him. We always have to ask – beg, demand – the bishop to give us the whole Christ, through all discipline and in all the Scriptures (This is apparent from the paragraphs of the Windsor Report I have posted). We have to remind the bishop to love and care for us. And of course each bishop has to be under the discipline of all the ecumenical councils of bishops, across the world and across the whole history of the Church.
We are under the discipline of the whole Church. If we believe that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are mistaken to believe that bishops, and clergy, can only be male, nevertheless we cannot ignore them or defy them. To do so would be lack of love, and neglect of what the whole Church has always held to be good. Roman Catholics and Orthodox are sure that they are preserving the tradition of the Church on this matter. What if they are right? Once again, the issue is not so much the ordaining of women or homosexuals, or any new self-identifying minority, but just of doing of what the Church has never done before, and doing it without it being the act of the whole Church. If we make new rules, whether about ordination or about anything else, we have failed to understand that the Church is the reconciliation of all opposing parts, and so the costly unity won by Christ, that now enables our mutual subordination and love, in which we consider each better than ourselves. Our talk about making new rules for ourselves is a deliberate walking away from the Roman Catholics and Orthodox. We can not act without the rest of the Church and still be Church ourselves. If we walk from the unity of the Church the truth of the Church leaves us too.
