It’s female, Jim but not as we know it! (A third reflection on God and gender)

In setting out these thoughts on God and gender, I feel it is a good moment to consider where this has got to and the questions it poses.

This started with the declaration by the Bishop-elect of Sherborne that “the Holy Spirit may appropriately be called ‘He’ or ‘She’”, matched (as I was reminded) by the Bishop of Durham’s similar willingness to refer to the Spirit as ‘She’. Even Rowan Williams, at one point in The Body’s Grace, puts the word ‘his’ used in relation to God within inverted commas.

I have long felt that changing our gendered use of language with regard to God would be no trivial matter. Indeed, I rather agree with CS Lewis when he wrote that,

... a child who had been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. (‘Priestesses in the Church’ in God in the Dock)

For myself, as for Lewis, I am persuaded that this would not be a variation on Christian tradition but a departure from it.

The reasons for this in what has been written so far derive from the fact that we are limited in the options of what we might be doing when we use gendered language.

The first option is that we are following an essentially grammatical convention, such as is found in many languages today as well as the biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. We may say that a thing is ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or even ‘neuter’, but we mean by this that the words used for them are declined according to the grammatical rules for feminine, masculine or neuter words.

Between the objects themselves, however, there is neither difference nor interdependency in gender terms. If the word for shoe is ‘feminine’, it does not require or follow that the word for foot will be ‘masculine’. Nor does any quality in the thing itself determine the grammatical ‘gender’. A battleship may be a ‘she’, and bunch of flowers could, in principle, be a ‘he’. It matters not at all.

Thus, in the case of the Holy Spirit, we know that the Hebrew for spirit is feminine and the Greek neuter (whilst the term Jesus used on one occasion, paraklētos, is masculine). In none of these instances does the declension of the word establish the gender of the object to which it refers. Indeed, it clearly could not, under ordinary conventions, be all three.

The first question we must put to our theologians and bishops (actual and potential) who advocate using ‘She’ for the Divinity is whether this is purely meant as a linguistic convention. Do they, to put it another way, intend that this means nothing different from what we have hitherto conveyed by using ‘He’?

My suspicion, however, is that this is not what they mean. Indeed, my suspicion is that when they advocate this usage they have half an eye on that section of their audience which is specifically female in the second sense we have established. For the second option is that we identify things as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ because they actually are male and female, objectively demanding the terms ‘he’ or ‘she’ which, if they are exchanged, simply denote the same qualities and differences by another term.

However, when asking in what sense things are objectively ‘male’ or ‘female’, the answer is not in terms of shared qualities or physical characteristics. Rather, a thing is, in this sense, male or female in relation to a complementary object. ‘Males’ may be big or small, strong or weak, passive or aggressive. ‘Females’ may be colourful or dull, dominant or submissive, loud or quiet. But what they all have in common is that for each male there is a complementary female, and vice versa.

That being the case, however, we must again ask our theologians and bishops whether this is what they have in mind when they suggest using ‘She’ for God or the Spirit. Do they mean that there is a complementary ‘He’? If not, then it would seem we are back to Option 1, that ‘She’ is not being used as distinct from ‘He’, except in a strictly grammatical-conventional sense. Yet, as I have suggested, I doubt that this is what they intend. We must then ask what exactly do they mean by ‘She’? And until we get an answer, we may say, with all due respect, that they are talking non-sense. That is to say, there is no sense that the rest of us can attach to their words, whatever they themselves may mean by them.

There are, I think, three difficulties that face those who are proposing this change and yet who want to argue that it makes no difference.

One is that it goes against the convention of millennia. As is clear from the move to do the opposite, the use of gendered language for God is well-established and hitherto almost unchallenged.

Secondly, it requires us to use language in ways that we simply have not done until now. Specifically, we have not used terms like ‘he’ or ‘she’ for persons as if they conveyed nothing about gender. This is not just a ‘theological’ problem —it is an issue of conceptualizing something for which we have no real concepts.

Thirdly, Scripture itself presents us with a dilemma. In Genesis 1:27 we are told that when God made man in his image he created ‘male and female’. And these are clearly ‘male and female’ in the objective sense of our Option 2, not the grammatical sense of Option 1.

In reality, the suggestion that we use ‘She’ for the Divinity seems to fall between the two. It is neither simply a grammatical proposal, yet nor is it clear what we are actually meant to understand by the term. It is meant, apparently, to refer to something ‘female’, but, it would seem, ‘not as we know it’.

John Richardson
22 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

So what do we mean by ‘He’? (A second reflection on God and gender)

It was the philosopher CEM Joad on the radio programme The Brains Trust who became famous for responding to almost every topic with “It all depends what you mean by ...”

People made gentle fun of it, but Joad was entirely right. If we do not know what we mean by the words we are using, then further discussion is futile.

In considering the language we should use for God, which began from the question of using ‘He’ or ‘She’ for the Holy Spirit, it is thus time to ask not just whether we should call God ‘He’ but what exactly we mean by ‘He’ in the first place.

The answer might appear to be simple. Indeed, much of the discussion suggests we assume that it is. By ‘he’ we generally think we mean something, or someone, male or of masculine gender. But this apparently straightforward response simply invites another question: what do we mean by ‘male’ or ‘masculine gender’?

What we do not mean is something or someone strong, or brave, or macho, and so on. We have not, in these discussions, been concerned with what qualities a male might have, or be expected to have. And in any case, there are plenty of males who do not possess these features.

Rather, we need a definition which applies to all that is ‘male’ —a definition which unarguably fits every masculine person or thing and which justifies us using the term.

But here we hit an immediate problem, for as far as many languages are concerned the assignment of gender seems to be entirely arbitrary. There is no apparent quality which determines that a table should be feminine in French or that a bowl should be masculine in Hebrew. Linguistic gender is simply a matter of grammatical rules. To say a thing is ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘neuter’ means only that the words used for it follow a particular declension.

If that were the end of the matter, we would say that by ‘he’ we mean we are simply referring to something for which the noun follows the rules of masculine declensions for a particular language. It would thus technically be entirely up to us, and it would make only a formal difference, if we invented for it a new noun of feminine declension and called the same thing ‘she’.

However, a little thought shows that this is only true for inanimate objects. When we refer to animate things, ‘he’ or ‘she’ take on fixed meanings (and the neuter ‘it’ is used only as a matter of expedience, not definition). We may note also that it is in this context that we think of things as ‘male’ or ‘female’, rather than simply ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’.

Yet here again, what defines a thing as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not immediately straightforward. When we consider plant life, the notion of masculine and feminine ‘characteristics’ is largely a matter for specialists to decide and discern. Even amongst animals, what we might easily think of as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ traits turn out to be found in both males and females of different species. The male is not necessarily always the bigger or the stronger, the female is not always the most nurturing or the least aggressive.

Nevertheless, by comparison with inanimate objects, the notion of male and female in the animate world is not merely a matter of vocabulary and grammar. Living things actually are male and female in a way that nonliving things are not.

Yet still we may ask, what makes one thing ‘male’ and another ‘female’. What is it that distinguishes them from one another and defines them in themselves?

There is, I would suggest, one thing (and one thing only) that effectively distinguishes and defines male and female in this context, and that is that they have a complementary opposite to which they may relate, primarily for the purpose of producing offspring.

At the linguistic level, gender is an arbitrary but absolute quality. That is to say, there is no particular reason in the thing itself why it should be assigned a particular gender. But whatever gender it is given, it possesses that gender irregardless of anything else. The French cup is neither more nor less ‘feminine’ because the saucer is also ‘la soucoupe’. It does not need a correspondingly ‘male’ item of crockery for us to be able to tell that it is ‘female’. Its gender, such as it is, stands ‘alone’.

In the world of animate things, however, it is a different matter. A thing may be large or small, passive or aggressive, rough or smooth, but if it has a corresponding female opposite, then it is male, and vice versa. Gender, in this context, is both fixed and relational. A thing is either male or female. We cannot simply decide, arbitrarily, that it is one or the other. Nor can we change its gender by calling it by another name or using a different language. Yet the gender it has, it possesses because of its relationship to something else.

Now it might be objected that there is both a more fixed aspect to gender and a more arbitrary quality than we have admitted. On the one hand, the biological male is usually defined as the sex which can fertilize the female gamete with sperm-cells, whilst the female is usually defined as the egg-producer. This would appear to provide a more fixed definition of male and female, and certainly in animals makes it easier to decide which is which. However, on the other hand, there is obviously no reason why we should call the egg-producer the ‘female’ and not the ‘male’. In this sense, the linguistic terms are just as arbitrary as for objects in the inanimate world.

Both these points are broadly true. However, it remains the case that gender in the animate world is both relational and is fixed relationally. If we decided, arbitrarily, that all ‘males’ were henceforth to be called ‘females’, then all females would, if language distinctions were to be maintained, most naturally switch to being ‘male’. (Or, if we chose some other term, it would effectively mean the same as ‘male’.)

We thus have two possible meanings of the term ‘he’. One is as a purely arbitrary label —a linguistic convention imposing grammatical rules, but bound by nothing else. And if this is how we use the term when applied to the Holy Spirit or to God then we may, indeed, just as readily call either or both ‘She’. This would sound odd to English-speakers, because we are less accustomed to the wider application of gender-rules in our language, but it need not be of any theological significance.

Two things, however, must be said if this is the route we adopt. First, there ought to be some consistency. In those languages which do assign gender to certain objects, they do not habitually and regularly switch genders. ‘Le livre’ does not become ‘la livre’ simply because the speaker feels like it or wants to make a point about the prevalence of women authors or the paucity of boys’ reading habits. Secondly, and following from this, it should be made clear that such a change has no relevance whatsoever to debates about human gender or social roles. To call God ‘She’ on these grounds would no more acknowledge the significance of ‘half the human race’ than it would the significance of the whole world of French tables.

Within our present use of language, however, the alternative is to accept that when and if we call the Holy Spirit or God ‘He’ —or even ‘She’— it must be in relation to something.

If this is the right course, to adopt (and I suggest that it is) then our next big question must be, “In relation to what?”

John P Richardson
21 June 2009

As a PS, though I have worked hard on this point, I am not claiming to have taken all the ‘bones’ out of the argument. I would welcome comments to challenge or clarify what has been said.

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

Dying is what soldiers do, isn't it?

On a different note, there is a report in today's Telegraph of an essay by an army officer which identifies, I think, one of the points which ought to be made about Afghanistan before we pour in any more resources:

"Self-protection has become the main tactic, reinforced by air strikes that can backfire and undermine the campaign.

"Even as the Army renders itself more and more immobile with heavier vehicles and infantrymen weighing as much as a medieval knight, still the fantasy of the "manoeuvrist approach is peddled in staff courses. [...] The reason for all this is clear – zero casualties has become the tacit assumption behind operations. [...] The point of going to war is not to then save ministerial discomfort by avoiding casualties and buttering the media. Wars cost lives and the media better get used to it. The British people understand this. They are far tougher than a worried government PR man imagines."

Every time the news media announce that a casualty is "the nth soldier" to die in Afghanistan, they reinforce the idea that fighting must never involve being killed - that the chief object of military operations is to keep casualties to a minimum.

Actually, if you want zero casualties, at least in the short term, don't go to war.

John Richardson


When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

In what sense is God ‘He’? (A first reflection on God and gender)

In what sense ought we to think of God as ‘He’?

The question is posed by divine revelation and by nature itself.

In the living world we find the two states of male and female. And although some organisms are capable of serving both functions, or alternating between both states, most species are exclusively either one or the other. Even in the plant world, where the characteristics of male and female are less easily recognized by most of us, the two conditions exist.

Within divine revelation, the God of Israel was worshipped within in a context where female deities were widely known, yet Yahweh was never regarded as one of them. The ‘generic’ term for ‘god’ in Hebrew, the language of the earliest Scriptures, is plural: ‘elohim’. Yet from the outset, Israel’s God is referred to by masculine singular verbs: “In the beginning created-he Elohim the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1).

Nor can we attribute this to Israel being a ‘patriarchal’ society, as if that determined the choice of deity. As far as we are aware, those societies which worshipped female deities were equally patriarchal. What is remarkable about Israel is not that they referred to their God as ‘He’, but that they only had one god to which they referred.

Circumstances thus force us into the kind of choice (if we may call it that) faced by Israel. If God is to be spoken of (not just grammatically, but conceptually), the way in which we speak tends towards one or other of the ways in which we speak of other ‘animate’ objects of our perception —to the male or the female. And since we worship only one God, it would appear we can make only one choice.

But whichever choice we make, what does it mean? Clearly, in Ancient Near Eastern culture, the ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ of the gods was conceived of in terms analogous to that of men and women. The gods had relationships, including sexual relationships with one another and with human beings. Equally clearly, the God of Israel was not like these gods, and that in one very important respect, namely that no form could be ascribed to Israel’s God.

The God of Israel was only to be directly encountered ultimately through hearing him:

Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. (Dt 4:15ff)

The list of exclusions clearly reflects the categories of the Creation narrative in Genesis 1, and thus “the likeness of male of female” is surely a reference to humanity itself (cf Gen 1:27). God is not to be imaged as a man or a woman. Yet within the unfolding revelation of Scripture, there is something enigmatic about this prohibition.

First, when God relates to Israel in ‘gendered’ terms it is as ‘male’. We have noted the use of grammar, but this is more particularly expressed in the interrelationship between God and his people as a (faithful) husband and (unfaithful) wife. Indeed, the eschatological hope is that Israel will know her God as a Bride knows her Beloved:

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’ [ishi]; you will no longer call me ‘my master [baali].’” (Hosea 2:16; MT 2:18)

Thus although Israel is prohibited from making images of God as ‘male’, Israel is nevertheless directed by God to think of God in terms of His ‘He’ to her own ‘she’.

Secondly, we read in Genesis 1:27 that God has already done what God has subsequently prohibited:

So God created man in his own image [tselem], in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

By contrast, in Numbers 33:51-52, we read these words of God to Moses,

Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.

The presuppositions behind Genesis 1:27 would have been very familiar to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. The ‘god’ (or the king) is ‘imaged’ so as to be present where the image is. The God who prohibits images, whether male or female, has thus already made of himself an adequate image, both male and female, in the form of the human race.

It is surely, however, the height of folly to say at this point that God is therefore neither male nor female. The two things we are specifically told about this image is that man (Heb: adam) is it, and it is male and female. Yet when God speaks of God to Israel, it is as ‘male’. As it stands, it is a conundrum, but we cannot cut this particular Gordian Knot by denying one of the two things the text explicitly draws to our attention.

At the same time, however, it is clear that God is not ‘a man’. Man (Heb adam) is God’s image, and is no more, therefore, ‘god’ in actuality than an idol was ‘the god’ or a statue was the king himself. An image, as Genesis 1:26 points out, is a ‘likeness’. But it is a likeness made in something other than the ‘substance’ of the thing being imaged. A photo may give me an image and likeness of my late great aunt, but I would never suppose that she herself was made of silver halides and paper, or sat forever in the same seat with the same clothes, hairstyle and expression.

The very notion of ‘image’ implies both congruity and dissonance —the image is both ‘like’ and completely ‘other than’ the thing being imaged.

Thus the ‘man’ of Genesis 1:26-27 images God in the stuff of this world. But that ‘stuff’ is as unlike the substance of God as dead paper is unlike living flesh —only, of course, more so. Similarly, ‘male and female’ images God, but God is not, thereby, ‘a male’ or ‘a female’ or (God indeed forbid) some androgynous hybrid of the two. We are confronted by an image which we cannot dismiss, but which equally, by virtue of being an image, conceals as well as reveals.

Thus we are forced by nature and Scripture to consider God in relation to our experience, and specifically our human experience, of male and female. This is the medium in which God has imaged God. But we are also forced to consider ourselves in relation to a God who adopts the position of ‘He’. We cannot evade these ‘givens’. Nor can we impose on them some other framework more conducive to our sensibilities. Israel of old was prohibited other gods, whether male or female. We today must similarly resist the temptation to fashion God in our image.

More work remains to be done.

John Richardson
20 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

So what, if we call the Spirit 'She'?

What does it mean if we call the Spirit ‘She’, as some are now suggesting?

One argument seems to be that it doesn’t mean anything —that since God is ‘beyond gender’ we might as well call the Spirit ‘She’ as ‘He’, so long as we don’t call the Spirit ‘It’ because this sounds ‘impersonal’.

There are, however, problems with this. Specifically, if God is beyond gender, then it does not matter, either, if we call God ‘She’. Similarly, within the godhead, although we may traditionally refer to the First Person of the Trinity as ‘the Father’, and the Second as ‘the Son’, it would not matter if we used the more neutral ‘Parent’ and ‘Child’, and, given the theological understanding we are expressing by calling the Spirit ‘She’, it would be entirely appropriate to call them, at least on occasion ‘Mother’ and ‘Daughter’.

Some would dismiss this suggestion as mischievous. However, we must ask ourselves on what grounds we might resist it if God is truly ‘beyond gender’ and our language for God must avoid mis-statements about God’s nature.

It might be argued that the language for the First and Second persons of the Trinity is ‘fixed’ by the biblical use of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. But if we can remain with this terminology without distorting our understanding of the godhead, why can we not similarly remain with the Scriptural (Jn 16:13) and traditional (credal) use of ‘He’ for the Spirit?

If the response is that we must, somehow, ‘balance’ our language by the use of ‘She’, however, we are back to our first objection, namely that at least with regard to God considered per se, we can (and perhaps must) use ‘She’ of God as well as God’s Spirit.

If, on the other hand, the response is that the language we use for the Third Person of the Trinity can differ from that which we use for the First and Second Persons, we must ask whether we are expressing thereby a difference in the being of the Spirit. Is the Spirit ‘She’ in a way that the Son is not ‘She’ and the Father is not ‘She’? If the answer is ‘no’, then we are back to the second objection, that we can just as appropriately call Father and Son ‘Mother’ and ‘Daughter’ without doing an injustice to the qualities of God. If the answer is ‘yes’, however, then we have to consider in what sense is the Spirit ‘She’ in a way that differs from Father and Son.

My own suggestion is that the whole use of ‘She’, as currently proposed and loosely practised is incoherent, dangerous and potentially heretical.

The test must be in our liturgy. Can we (and should we, as some are advocating) call on God as our Mother? More specifically in this instance, could we, without qualms, change the Nicene Creed to say of the Spirit, “She has spoken through the prophets”? Is the only resistance to this our prejudice and inconsistency? Would this be liberating, or would it be disastrous?

If, however, we should not do this, then we should not suggest that is does not matter whether we call the Spirit, or the godhead ‘He’ or ‘She’. If it matters, it truly matters.

Revd John P Richardson
18 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

"Let's call the Spirit she for a change": Bishop of Sherborne (elect)

Er, we'll get back to you on this, bishop.

Personally, if he did this in a service while I was there, I'd walk out.

John Richardson
16 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

What the ...?

I was just reading Tim Goodbody's apologia pro vita sua, "Why I am still an Anglican" on the Fulcrum website when I was pulled up short by this bit:

I am a Canon A5 evangelical, which means I took my ordination vows very seriously; when I was ordained I had to prostrate myself before a bishop; I felt very uncomfortable about this, but when my friend (also an evangelical) standing next to me on the platform said “I will do whatever it takes to follow my vocation”, I saw her point and assented to the ritual. I was glad I did because at that point (during the singing of the Veni Creator) the Holy Spirit came upon me (indeed us) in an immensely powerful way.

I'm not sure which bit of this has my gob most smacked as it were: prostration before a bishop? had to? also an evangelical? whatever it takes to follow my vocation? the Holy Spirit came on us (implicitly because)?

The only bit I felt comfortable about was the bit that said, "I felt very uncomfortable about this."

I do not post at Fulcrum -and it might fairly be asked why I read (probably for the same reason that some people read this blog) -but I offer it to other readers for their consideration.

I am stunned - and I didn't think I could be by anything that still went on in the Church of England.

John Richardson
10 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

The BNP and the 'rise of Fascism' - what's in a name?

As people fume about the election of a couple of BNP MEPs, the rise of the Far Right and, as one commentator put it, the shame of us sending 'Fascists' to Europe when we once liberated Europe from Fascism, it is worth reading again George Orwell's 1944 essay, What is Fascism?. Given that he was writing a good deal nearer the demise of the last (and first) self-proclaimed Fascist regime than we are, the issues he raises about the 'fuzziness' of the term are worth bearing in mind when it is bandied about in modern debate. Here are some quotes, with my own highlights, (but do read the whole thing):

Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’
[...]
In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.
[...]
Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism.
[...]
It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning.
[...]
... as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
[...]
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

I would simply add that the use of the word 'Fascist' is (still) an excuse for not thinking, not defining and not engaging. It is like the use of 'fundamentalist' or 'bigot' - it is something 'everyone' (except those on the receiving end) knows is supposed to excite our disapproval. As Orwell put it, "even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it " (my emphasis).

'Fascist' is, in short, a boo word and as such, it appeals to the mass instinct inside each one of us. It contributes nothing, however, to our understanding of the real issues.

John Richardson
9 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

Richard Holloway and the limits of Anglicanism

Ed: I'm reproducing this article from Geoffrey Kirk as it sits very well with my own series on unity and Anglicanism.

Just when you thought it was safe…Richard Holloway is back! The white hope of the Loughborough Conferences, founder member of Affirming Catholicism and former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church has come a long way. The campaigner for women’s ordination who once described opponents as ‘seeking to sweep back the tide of God’ has now taken leave of the deity to whom he once appealed. Holloway no longer believes in God – but he continues to function as a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church, celebrating the sacraments and preaching the word (not, of course of God; but presumably of …Richard Holloway).

Like Jack Spong before him, Holloway is making a splash on the lecture circuit. ‘A bishop rethinks…’ ‘Agnostic bishop challenges churchmen…’

However offensive it may be to the rest of us, Holloway has grasped that there is money to be made from being an unbelieving prelate; a notoriety not readily available to a private individual. Richard Holloway ‘the Voltaire of Morningside’ would be nowhere near as marketable a commodity as an atheistical bishop of the Episcopal Church. And so he hangs on to the mitre he once cast into the Thames; to the eternal shame of the Church to which he belongs.

Vain and self-serving though this atheistical posturing is, Holloway has characteristically touched a raw nerve. ‘The worldwide Anglican Church has made room for "happy clapping" evangelicals, bells-and-smells Catholics, women priests and, in the United States, openly gay clergy and even practitioners of other faiths,’ he is reported as saying. ‘So surely, he argues, it can find room for people like him - Christians who don't believe in God.’ The challenge is to define and justify the limits of Anglican comprehensiveness; and he knows that it will be no mean task.

Outsiders might well conclude that Anglicans can only get agitated about second order issues – women’s ordination, same sex marriages and gay bishops. When it comes to dogma (even at the most fundamental level) they exhibit a culpable coyness. Why does the appointment of an openly gay bishop result in threats of schism and actual infringements of provincial boundaries and the continuance in episcopal orders of a Spong or a Holloway do nothing of the sort? It is a good question.

The answer (as Richard Holloway has astutely grasped) is that there is, and always has been, a strain of theological levity at the heart of Anglicanism. The price of being a comprehensive (or as they now say ‘inclusive’) church has been to come dangerously close to not being a church at all.

This theological levity is most readily apparent in two related areas: the Eucharist and Holy Orders.

Anglicans believe (or have said that they believe) that orders are an effective sign of communion in the Church. In particular they have maintained that episcopacy operates to enhance koinonia in three modes: geographically (from diocese to diocese), historically (down the ages) and locally (within each diocese). At the same time they have maintained a doctrine of provincial autonomy such that orders are thought to be at the disposal of each local church, without reference to others or to the Church Universal.

It does not take a genius to see that these understandings are mutually exclusive. Nor is it difficult to grasp the ecumenical consequences of such confusion. Anglicans have traditionally sought to establish with other churches what has been called ‘full visible unity’, a unity necessarily involving full recognition and interchangeability of orders. They have sought, in other words, in relationship with other churches, what they will not and cannot establish amongst themselves!

Things are no better with regard to the Holy Communion. What is the Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist? The honest answer must be that no such thing exists (as the studied and self-conscious ambiguity of Anglican liturgies serves to demonstrate). The ‘family meal of Christians’ is for Anglicans a battleground of incompatible theologies, from Transubstantiation to Zwinglianism with all the cosy ambiguities between. One party has it monstrances and the other pours the leftovers back into the bottle. The very best that can be said is that on a matter that should unite them, Anglicans agree to be divided.

Richard Holloway has seen all this. Here is his Eucharistic theology as recently reported in an Australian newspaper:

‘It very much depends on the interpretation you put on it,’ he explained. ‘I still very much believe in the community of the church. One of the most fundamental strengths of the church, or any religious community, is that it is still an expression of the human family. The eucharist [communion], in my understanding, is the family meal. It is the way you express your identity and membership of that body. I happen to believe that it is a beautiful art form as well.’

What, he wants you to ask yourself, could be more Anglican than that - where institutional loyalty replaces doctrinal certainty, and the aesthetic takes precedence over the theological?

The tragedy of those who are seeking to defend some sort of orthodoxy in the Anglican Communion is that Holloway has unerringly identified the wound of Anglicanism, and that no one seems capable of cauterizing it. GAFCON, FoCA, the Anglican Province of North America: all embrace the mixed economy of orders and the brand of theological fudge which has precipitated the present crisis. And - which is further grist to the Holloway mill - they all seem to be held together, not by doctrinal agreement but by mere prurience.

Against such a background it is all too easy for the likes of him to preen themselves as ‘courageous’, ‘open’, ‘inclusive’, ‘Christian’ even.

Geoffrey Kirk+ (FiFUK)

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

The rise in teenage murderers?

For some time now, I’ve been trying to verify a hunch that whereas murder was once an ‘adult’ activity, it has recently become more a preserve of the young —indeed, the very young.

About three years ago, I noticed the astonishing number of news stories online about murders in which the victim or the perpetrator was in their teens.

Often, if the victim was in their teens then so, it seemed, was the perpetrator. What was even more alarming was that in the case of teenage perpetrators of all kinds of murders there were often two or more individuals involved.

Trying to get specific numbers is difficult. Curiously, I have twice tried requesting information on the numbers of teenagers convicted for murder from our own Ministry of Justice, but without success (even though the website says this is possible under the Freedom of Information Act).

Today, however, I found that the Google news archive now shows a timeline of results for a search, and this is very interesting.

If you click here, you will see the result for the search term "guilty of murder" (this should open in a new window or tab, so you will need to come back to this page afterwards). At first glance this might seem to suggest the murder conviction rate has gone up since 1860, declined in the 1940s, and then has risen again since the 1960s. But of course what we also have here is the number of filed news accounts and a dramatically increasing population. On its own, the graph is interesting, but tells us nothing about rates of increase or decline.

However, if you click here, you will see the results for the same search term, only this time just for the period 1950-2009, and this is where it starts to get interesting.

Now click here, and see the results for the search term 'teenager + "guilty of murder"', again for 1950-2009. This time, we have factored out the increase in news media and population. The difference is, I'm sure you'll agree, striking. Click between the two pages or tabs to compare the two. Whilst the rate per head of population may not have changed, the rate of reports has increased dramatically. Indeed, between 1975 and 1995 it increased exponentially. If you scroll down the page, you will also see that the stories are, indeed, generally about teenagers who have carried out, and been convicted of, murders.

However, there may still be other factors involved, so as a kind of control try comparing 'wife+"guilty of murder"' and 'husband+"guilty of murder"' over the same period as before. This time it can be seen that both rates of reporting have increased - and the 'husband' rate slightly more than the 'wife' - but that the rates are not markedly different (and, thankfully, both seem recently to have fallen).

It is, I agree, not absolute proof. But it is surely an indication of a trend.

John Richardson
4 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.

Overcoming schism - the nettle Protestantism must grasp

Recently I spent an hour looking at (as it happens) the Ship of Fools discussion forums —but the same would be true of numerous Protestant blogs and websites —and I have come to the conclusion that what we see represented there is not Christianity, in the strict sense, at all. Rather, what Cardinal Newman said in the 19^th century is undoubtedly true of many modern believers who think of themselves as Christian:

“Protestants, generally speaking, have not faith, in the primitive meaning of that word ...”

The problem is, we do not see ‘faith’ as trusting in a received tradition passed on to us through others, as it originally was. Instead, ‘faith’ has come to mean a completely individualistic, ‘pick and mix’, self-made religion. It is ‘my faith’, not ‘the Church’s faith’, around which I organize my life. Pretending to be disciples —learners —of Christ, we have enthroned ourselves as the final aribiters of what is true.

The result is chaos, at the individual and corporate level. The present-day struggles of Anglicanism are simply the logical outcome of allowing everyone, doctrinally, to do ‘what is right in his or her own eyes’.

In this post I’m going to try to sum up my thoughts about the causes, and possible cure, of this disunity within Protestantism. Here are the key points so far:

1. The gospel demands unity. There is ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.’

2. Christian unity is, however, ‘unity in the truth’, not in ‘structures’. It is possible to be baptized and enjoying fellowship in the Lord’s supper, yet outside the truth (1 Cor 10:1-6).

3. Historically, Protestantism is inherently divisive. This is clear evidence that something is wrong, since the gospel is inherently unifying.

4. This divisiveness is due not to the principle of sola scriptura, as some have suggested, but to an overestimation of ‘private judgement’.

5. The individual is not the author of doctrine.

6. The Christian is, first and foremost a learner.

7. Christ himself instituted the office of teachers in the Church, from whom Christians should learn the faith.

8. The task of the teacher is faithfully to hand on, and defend, the Apostolic tradition.

9. Teachers therefore need to be as fully aware as possible of the history of the Church and its established doctrines.

10. Theological history helps us discern ‘dead ends’ and ‘positive trends’ (the ‘Gamaliel’ principle). Theological history favours contemporary conservatism.

11. Creeds and confessions represent the past work of the Church in attempting to establish sound doctrine in accordance with the Apostolic tradition.

12. Churches may rightly expect their members to have due regard to their own formularies.

13. A Church (denomination) which does not have proper regard for its formularies will become authoritarian since, in the face of doctrinal division, it will use its disciplinary measures to enforce structural unity.

These things are true, I would suggest, for most Protestant churches, but from here on I’m going to be very ‘Anglican’ in suggesting how things might be improved.

Since the unity of the gospel is ‘unity in the truth’, and since the truth of the gospel is, by Christ’s own devising, entrusted to and imparted by the teaching ministry of the Church, the Church which wishes to prevent internal disunity must look first to the quality of its teaching ministers. In the case of the Church of England, this should mean looking to the bishops, above all, as the ‘gate keepers’ of the ordained ministry.

Unfortunately, the bishops have largely bought into the idea that their role is not to define and defend doctrine, but to ‘referee’ the various doctrinal positions within their dioceses. In others words, they are actually upholding Protestantism’s divisiveness. Far from making things better, they are, in most cases, actively making them worse.

This is not, I must emphasise, because they are bad people. For the most part, they are good people and well-intentioned. But the well-intentioned maintenance of structures which are antithetical to the unity of the gospel is not a Christian action. Nor can it be depicted as the fulfilment of episcopal ministry.

Now this is not to introduce some alien notion into Anglicanism. Rather it is to recall the Church to its founding principles. It is well known that in the Ordinal which forms part of the Church’s formularies, both bishops and priests are required to teach sound doctrine and contradict error. The bishop or the priest who therefore takes a laissez faire attitude at this point is the true ‘alien’ to the Church of England.

Moreover, the parameters of true doctrine are also clearly established within the formularies. The Thirty-nine Articles and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer include some doctrines and exclude others. And whilst it is undoubtedly true that this is widely disregarded in the Church, that does not make such disregard ‘Anglican’ —rather, it is itself a disregard of Anglicanism.

There would, moreover, be little that could stand in a bishop’s way should he decide to urge both his ministers and the people in his diocese to take these doctrinal boundaries more seriously. There is surely no-one who could claim he was exceeding his episcopal prerogatives by doing so!

It would thus, for example, be entirely appropriate for the bishop to demand from potential candidates for ordination some demonstration of an awareness of, and engagement with, the Anglican theological heritage. At present, many such candidates are required to write an essay on their understanding of the priesthood. It might be rather more challenging to them, and more useful to both them and the Church in the long term, if they were required to write a similar essay on their responses to the Thirty-nine Articles. Certainly, every training course ought to include a section devoted to their consideration.

Similarly, it would be extremely valuable if the standard liturgy at theological colleges, on training courses, and for Continuing Ministerial Education events were the Book of Common Prayer. The reason is simple: on the one hand, there are many parishes where the BCP is hardly used (sometimes for good, missiological, reasons), and yet, on the other hand, the BCP enshrines (in a way that later liturgies often deliberately do not) the fundamental reformed Anglican understanding of divine service.

Many ordination candidates have almost no experience of this. It is not in their bloodstream, nor will it ever be through their normal liturgical usage. Therefore the college or course ought to make up for this deficit by giving them as much exposure as possible to this heritage.

These three suggestions —that bishops should call their clergy and people back to the Anglican heritage, that ministerial candidates should have engaged with the theology of the Articles, and that those candidates should also be made practically familiar with the Prayer Book —would go some considerable way to establishing that Anglicanism is a confessional faith. The denial of this is surely one of the great myths of our time. Indeed, the suggestion that Anglicanism is not a confessional faith, and specifically a Protestant confession, would have come as a surprise to the compilers of the Articles and the Prayer Book, the Marian martyrs and, not least, to John Henry Newman, who once wrote,

... it is notorious that the Articles were drawn up by Protestants and intended for the establishment of Protestantism ...

This is why the establishment of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is so important. It is not just about ‘politics’, it is about theology —or rather two theologies, one that sees the individual as the final judge in matters of faith and doctrine, to be decided privately between himself and God, the other that sees the individual as the recipient of both faith and doctrine through means instituted by Christ, but reliant on others.

This, I suggest, is the nettle Protestantism needs to grasp if it is to overcome its schismatic nature and regain one of the true marks of the Church —that we are united in the truth of God’s holy Word.

Revd John P Richardson
1 June 2009

When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may not be posted.