Why Steve Chalke is mistaken and the liberality of liberals cannot be trusted

(This article needs to be read in conjunction with my earlier post here.)

It was in the period immediately after the 20^th 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