How can proponents of women’s ordination attempt to take the intellectual high ground when their arguments are so weak? asks Geoffrey Kirk
There is a fairly widespread assumption in the prevailing culture of Britain that people of faith rely on dogma and bigotry and that no one with a brain can believe in God. I am exaggerating, of course, but you know what I mean.’ So wrote Jane Williams, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a theologian in her own right, in the Church Times. She described attitudes to people of faith in contemporary Britain as ‘lazy’ and ‘scornful’. Meanwhile the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has launched a ‘Not Ashamed’ campaign urging Christians to stand up for their rights.
All this is admirable, if a little belated; but it comes strangely from the lips of two enthusiastic proponents of the ordination of women. Have they not noticed, one is obliged to ask, that laziness and scorn are the hallmarks of those within the Church who have relentlessly sought to marginalize those who in conscience disagree with them?
Accusations of bigotry, misogyny and worse have been stock in trade. If liberal ‘mainstream’ Anglicans are feeling the pinch now, they are merely experiencing for themselves the treatment which they have meted out to others.
Speaking for myself I can bear with something approaching equanimity the not infrequent insinuations that opposition to women’s ordination is akin to a sort of personality disorder. It is the wholly unfounded intellectual arrogance of the women’s ordination lobby which gives me grief. How in the world can they effortlessly assume the intellectual high ground, when their arguments are so weak and so fraudulent?
How did it come about, for example, that the General Synod of the Church of England (a body not noted for either its scholarship or its intellectual acumen) could opine that ‘there are no fundamental objections’ to the ordination of women – when the best minds of the two greatest churches in Christendom assert that there are?
One has only for a moment to consider a selection of the ‘arguments’ generally advanced to support the innovation to see how threadbare is the carpet on which the proponents stand.
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