5 October 2015 A.D. Andrew Brown’s Dual-Ended Gassing from THE GUARDIAN: Opposing gay bishops for the sake of church unity is stupid
5 October 2015 A.D. Andrew Brown’s Dual-Ended Gassing from THE GUARDIAN: Opposing gay bishops for the sake of church unity is stupid
Brown, Andrew. “Opposing gay bishops for
the sake of church unity is stupid.” The
Guardian. 5 Oct 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/05/church-opposing-england-gay-bishops-unity.
Accessed 5 Oct 2015.
Opposing gay bishops
for the sake of church unity is stupid
The Church of England should not worry about gay
bishops driving away worshippers – the current orthodox bench has done that
already
What
makes churches fail? Obviously the answer has very little to do with the historical truth of scripture, or else there would be no Mormons,
Muslims, Christians or Jews. But one very popular answer is that it has to do
with a lack of conviction. On this theory, it doesn’t matter what you believe,
so long as you are firm and unyielding in the way that you believe it. The
popular tabloid formulation of this was to ask what would happen if the trumpet
gave an uncertain sound, but since this is a biblical quotation, it has
rather lost its force.
That would certainly
account for the success of obvious charlatans like the prosperity
gospel preachers. On the other hand, few people could be more firm and
unyielding in their beliefs than hardline Calvinists, and
they have just about disappeared from most parts of the world. It’s no use
being consistently convinced that you are right when you’re both wrong and
boring.
But there is one form
of the “uncertain trumpet” argument that retains currency, and that’s the
belief that any church which compromises on modern sexual mores is doomed. In
the Catholic church, this takes the form of arguing that any relaxation of the
hard line on remarriage after divorce, or even contraception, will automatically plunge the church into the abyss
into which liberal protestantism has disappeared. There is a flaw in that
argument, of course, which is that 30 years of maintaining the hard line under John Paul II
and Benedict
XVI did absolutely nothing to stem the decline of the Catholic church in the west. If ex-Catholics
made up a denomination of their own, they would be the second largest religious
grouping in the USA, and almost all of them have fled with hands over their
ears from a church which was blowing its own trumpet with deafening certainty.
Churches are
imaginative constructs, and so there’s nothing that destroys them more quickly
than indifference
The Church of England
has its own version of this argument, which goes back to the unbelieving
Bishop of Durham, a figure of legendary horror to evangelicals. This man,
identified by historians as the Right Rev David
Jenkins, was widely supposed to believe nothing at all of traditional
Christianity, despite being the fifth most senior bishop in the hierarchy. He
certainly did not believe in the virgin birth, nor in the bodily resurrection.
Neither, of course, do most churchgoers. It was an article of faith among
conservatives, though, that churchgoers required a bishop who would believe all
the things they could not themselves suppose were true, and he was succeeded by
a succession of men of unimpeachable orthodoxy. Under their stewardship, church
attendance in the diocese declined by 36% in 20 years.
Last week I was talking
to a man who has some influence over the choice of bishops in the Church of
England, and he said confidently that Dr Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, could never be a
bishop because he could not function as a focus of unity in the diocese. In
every part of the country, there are noisy and assertive evangelical groups who
would make a production of marching out of the Church of England if he were
appointed a bishop.
It may be true that
some will react like that. What’s wrong with this argument is not that it’s
cowardly, so much as that it is stupid. It mistakes visibility for
significance. The implicit assumption is that clergy who leave the church (and
it is almost always clergy) on points of theological principle, and who
announce that they are doing so, are somehow more real than all the more
numerous laity who just quietly disappear without saying anything. None of the endlessly
trumpeted schisms in the Church of England, over sexuality or gender, or
anything else, have resulted in the loss of anything like a third of the church
– yet that is what the completely orthodox boredom of the bench of bishops has
managed over the last 30 years.
Churches are
imaginative constructs, and so there’s nothing that destroys them more quickly
than indifference. They are also supposed to be concerned with stuff that
really matters. A pompous and complacent bishop, chosen because they tick all
the boxes, can only be a focus for pomp and complacency. Give me a focus for
disunity any day. He will not drive half as many worshippers away.
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