When the debate about the ordination of women to the priesthood was being conducted in the early ’90s I was working as a chaplain in Oxford. In a college, which had been rather slow in admitting women as undergraduates, members of the Senior Common Room, (now fully committed to ensuring equal numbers of men and women both as senior and junior members) sometimes approached me to express their puzzlement that anyone could be opposed to the ordination of women – surely they must all be rampant misogynists, fundamentalists, lunatics etc? So although I was in favour of women’s ordination I found myself having to explain (with a phrase that has an unfortunate resonance with another even more tempestuous debate) that some of my best friends could not accept such ordinations and that there was a coherent and rational argument which could be made to support their position and that they did not have deep seated psychological problems with women and that they could be ‘polite, patient and reasonable’ men and women.
The argument, I tried to explain, does not in fact have primarily to do with gender but with the nature of the Church of England and with our understanding of what it means to be a Church. Imagine someone who knows nothing about Christianity (someone like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26ff) who picks up a Bible, and starts to read it. She finds her interest aroused and wants to know more. How is this strange text to be explained and where is she to find guidance? She learns that there are churches who could help her but in the process discovers that there are different churches who disagree with one another. So she needs to find out where these differences come from and how important they are. She needs to know which church will speak with the greatest authority in providing her with guidance. She needs to know which church will help her live authentically according to the text which has begun to inspire her.
Imagine that this enquirer comes to us and we have to provide an answer to these questions. We might try to point to the quality of community life we offer but such a response might sometimes be hard to sustain, however hard we try. We might appeal to the quality of Anglican scholarship. We might point to the past achievements of the Church of England, and to the number of its adherents across the world. In some instances the record will be a good one, but other things might cause us deep embarrassment. And so we will arrive at the authority of tradition and our connection with the oldest roots of Christianity. We will admit to the significant breaks with other representatives of that tradition in the 16th century and before in the separation of the Churches in East and West, but we may say that those breaks are in the slow process of healing and that we hope for the church to be reunited. In the meantime we might say that the Church of England sees itself as both reformed and catholic and that its authority is based on Scripture primarily but also on a living tradition rooted in the earliest expressions of faith in the early centuries of the church’s life. It is true that tradition can err and itself needs contemporary exposition; it is true that the majority has not always been right and as time has passed what was the minority has come to be seen as holding a deeper version of the truth. Nevertheless authority is best located in the patient working out of faith by Christians trying to hold together despite their different views of how tradition is to be interpreted. And that patient working out is vested in the authority of Bishops listening to the church and to one another.
What happens then when one group of Christians like us wish to make a change which our close neighbours in the most ancient churches have difficulty with? Obviously it depends on the nature of the change; is it of primary importance and to do with the essentials of Christian faith and practice, or is it of secondary importance? In this instance it may be that those who look to the more ancient churches will say it is of primary importance, those who feel closer to the Protestant and Non-conformist churches will say it is only secondary. However, the scene is further complicated by conservative Protestants who believe in the ‘headship’ of man over woman based on Scripture and who therefore find themselves in the same position as those who are closer to the Catholic or Orthodox tradition but for different reasons.
So if you are an Anglican who has always seen your church as closer to the Catholic/Orthodox position and while deeply valuing the forms in which you have been nurtured as a Christian, have longed for unity – then an issue like the ordination of women will be deeply painful not for any reasons of gender or justice, but because of your Christian identity. If and when the Catholic and Orthodox traditions accept the ordination of women you will have no problem in accepting it. Your problem will not be with the decision itself but with the way it has been pre-empted by the Church of England. Your question will be “By what authority do we do this?’
It was because General Synod felt that Anglicans of this outlook were still an important part of our Church that the provision for ‘flying Bishops’ and ‘parochial opting out’ were made in 1993. Since then of course there have been ‘difficult bishops’ on both sides, conservative bishops who have been aggressively defensive and liberal bishops who have tried to liberalise traditional parishes.
These arguments have perhaps nearly run their course. Some of those who believed that reunion between Rome and Canterbury was before 1993 a real possibility have come to see that they were over optimistic. There are those who have been able to accept their place as a protected part of the Church of England, who will now find the appointment of women bishops ‘a bridge too far’ and leave. There are those who will fight on, if they are allowed to, as a diminishing and perhaps increasingly inward looking enclave. There are those who will form alliances with conservative evangelicals in order to strengthen their minority position. Even so, the majority of Anglicans see this issue as primarily a matter of justice. They adopt a position, which can be said to have evolved from Scripture and which they believe will eventually come to be accepted by all churches. In the meantime the appointment of women bishops will bring closer Anglican reunion with Methodists and perhaps other non conformist churches. Ecumenical relations with older churches may become more difficult but they will not disappear altogether.
In the meantime we have to decide whether we care at all for those whose Anglican Catholic faith prevents them from accepting this development. Should we make any provision for them or simply tell them to go to Rome?
We might also consider what we would want to happen if the boot were on the other foot so to speak. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently begun to talk about the possibility of ‘two track Anglicanism’. The main stream will include all those who feel that the Church cannot yet relax its current statements forbidding the ordination or consecration of ‘practicing’ homosexuals, or the blessing of same sex unions. The subsidiary stream will want to adopt a more liberal policy but find themselves in a minority and in some ways excluded from the main stream. It is already the case that the Church of England has made more concessions to those who oppose women’s ordination than it seems likely will be made to those who are ‘liberal’ on homosexuality. Why, we might wonder, is it more difficult to be a minority liberal than a minority conservative in a church that has always sought consensus?
In the end, however, the prior question, whatever the presenting issue, has to do with authority. At one extreme we might say that it lies with the individual community (ie parish or diocese) to decide what it wishes to do in accordance with local circumstances; at the other extreme we might say it lies with a central authority (ie a Pope, the head of the Anglican Communion, or an ecumenical council) to decide for the whole church. As Anglicans we are somewhere in the middle perhaps, which is why we find these debates so difficult to manage.
Women Bishops – a response
Stephen Tucker