(This article needs to be read in
conjunction with my earlier post here.)
It was in the period immediately after the
20th November defeat of the Measure to introduce women bishops in the
Church of England that I had something of an epiphany.
During this time, I was trying to fathom out
what possible good could come of the whole situation. One thing, I concluded,
was an outbreak of honesty. Before the vote, there were many people telling the
‘traditionalists’ that they were ‘valued’, that they should be ‘enabled to
flourish’, ‘respect’ and so on.
You may, for example, have seen the videos on the website of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself
to this effect. We were all going to ‘journey together’ into the future, and so
on.
Unfortunately, when the vote went the
‘wrong’ way, what we saw was not an acknowledgement that the flourishing of
traditionalists would have to be sought another way, but an outbreak of
something little short of rage and the heaping of opprobrium on those,
especially those evangelicals, who had dared to mess things up.
The vote of ‘no confidence’ in Philip
Giddings, the chair of the House of Laity, is just one example. Another is the
member of the House of Laity who wrote that the doctrine of ‘headship’, which
lies at the heart of the evangelical objection,
... is to be seen
alongside a number of similar major historical issues where prejudice and
discrimination have been justified by selected biblical references. These
include slavery, national socialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Male
headship has its roots in the same soil of prejudice and discrimination. (Gavin
Oldham, email to members of the House of Laity)
Would that he had been so clear in his
understanding in the run up to the vote! But then if he had, it might presumably
have added to the pressure to vote against the Measure.
Yet such sentiments led to my epiphany,
which was the realization that whereas I regard supporters of the ordination and
consecration of women as largely mistaken, they regard me, and those who share
my views, as immoral.
And immorality in the Church is something
which cannot be tolerated. Read more
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