Terra Infirma

I'm still catching up with posts here, but I leap ahead of myself a bit to think about yesterday's General Synod vote, very emphatically, to support the proposed legislation allowing women to be consecrated bishops in the Church of England. Because I know too many people on the anti side of the question, I don't regard the decision with any joy as such, but I am thoroughly relieved it's done. Once you ordain women as deacons and priests, to insist they can never occupy the episcopal order is silly, illogical and shameful, and sweeping that distinction away can do the Church nothing but good.

I find the arguments against ordaining women very weak indeed. The arguments from Scripture sound uncompromising, until you dig into all the things in Holy Writ even the soundest of Evangelicals among us do not adhere to, and all the interminable questions over which bits of what you say you regard as God's Word you nevertheless put to one side, and which you enshrine as essential, open up unconvincingly. What you are left with is a series of specious justifications for the distinctions you make, drawn not from Christ but from earthly prejudice. It would be better to say no more than 'We think God wants men to do this and women to do that, but we don't know why.' The answer to that question can only become clear by experience.

I opened the Bible as usual this morning, and at the moment I'm going through the Psalms. 'How pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity', Psalm 133 informed me. One astonishing aspect of yesterday's vote is that of a Church making sincere efforts to accommodate difference in an unprecedented way. You may argue that this is a foolhardy venture, but it is a dramatic and impressive one. Of course, this is what Anglicans have said they've been doing since the vote to ordain women in 1992, but they haven't really meant it; instead that decision was veiled in dishonesty all round, in that its proponents believed the antis would all change their minds, leave, or die, and the antis believed they could deflect the next step in the process, and neither side actually made any of this clear. Even before this particular issue became pressing, the Anglican Church's much-vaunted 'broadness' has always been a bit fake. Except on national bodies and committees, Anglo-Catholics, Liberals and Evangelicals have been able to exist within their own little bubbles, actually having a minimal amount to do with each other and being effectively able to ignore one another's existence, able to pretend that the Church is really them and other congregations like them. We can't pull off that trick any more, and it could be, could be, that we could actually begin learning from those who are different from us rather than merely pretending that that's what we do. But we'll have to be determined to do it. Can we?