Some notes on Anglican ordination, gender and ministry

The background — Nottingham and the NT

We begin with history — in 1977 Resolution J6 of the Nottingham Statement, produced at the second National Evangelical Anglican Congress, stated,

We repent of our failure to give women their rightful place as partners in mission with men. Leadership in the Church should be plural and mixed, ultimate responsibility normally singular and male.

‘Plural and mixed’ is certainly the pattern of ministry we find in the New Testament churches — to give one example, Romans 16 names several women ministers.

In the 1970s, however, shared ministry was a fairly novel concept in the Church of England. ‘House groups’ were a revolutionary idea as was the phrase ‘every member ministry’. In 1977, these proposals were radical regarding plurality of leadership, but fundamentally traditional regarding gender and leadership.

Since then, we have ‘moved on’ regarding the issue of gender, and both Anglicanism and evangelicalism have become deeply divided – as exemplified by Lis Goddard and Clare Hendry in their joint book The Gender Agenda (Nottingham: IVP, 2010).

This illustrates how two people can both believe they are being faithful to Scripture and come to practically incompatible conclusions. It is also a reminder of the theological principle formulated by Dire Straits: “two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong” (or both of them). Furthermore it shows that there is still a debate to be had, even so many years on from 1993.

Personally, I think there are weaknesses in the arguments advanced both by Goddard and Hendry. Nevertheless, I am still unpersuaded overall that the outcome advocated by Goddard, which would introduce women as Anglican incumbents and now bishops, actually takes us in a direction more compatible with Scripture than what was expressed in the Nottingham Statement.

An historic struggle

Historically, the Church of England, like all the mainstream churches, has struggled to resolve its structures of ministry with its doctrine of the ministry.

Our structures are post-apostolic. The preface to the Ordinal in the BCP is very careful:

It is evident unto all men diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.

NB, it says “these Orders”, not “three Orders”. There are ‘these orders’, but it is evident to anyone diligently reading holy Scripture that they are by no means the same as we have today.

The NT has deacons, but they are not ‘probationary priests’. Rather, they are an office in themselves, and almost certainly it was an office open to both men and women (cf Rom 16:1).

The NT has presbyters, but they are not to be confused with the ‘priests’ of the OT — which of course is easily done when you use the same word for both — and there is more than one per congregation.

And the local bishops of the NT are one and the same thing as the local presbyters.

Roger Beckwith in his Elders in Every City shows that the formal pattern of ministry was probably based on the synagogue model, meaning that the presbyter-bishops would have been responsible for running and governing the community and in some cases, though not all, for teaching.

But even this leadership would have been mixed, and it is clear that the ministry at least was ‘plural’ to use the NEAC phrase.

Our problem is that we are trying to fit NT principles to a context that in many respects is not like the NT.

Ministry: ‘charismatic’ or ‘pragmatic’

And there is another difference between then and now. Then, the principle for selection was ‘pragmatic meritocracy’, exemplified by Romans 12:3-8:

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. ⁴ Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, ⁵ so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. ⁶ We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. ⁷ If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; ⁸ if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.

What you should do in the church was assessed ‘on merit’. The person gifted in serving should serve, the gifted teacher should teach, etc.

Hence Titus (1:5-9), when he is left in Crete to appoint ‘elders in every city’, is given a list of outward, observable qualities to look for in those he should appoint.

That, however, gave way to what I would call a ‘charismatic aristocracy’ model which prevails to this day. The ministry is something to which you are called by God, and for which you are empowered from without — usually attributed to the gifting of the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands.

In our context, however, this may not reflect the practicalities to which Scripture refers.

Where this matters in the gender debate is that people are given an authority by ordination which may well not correspond to the realities of relationships established on other grounds recognized by Scripture.

Liberty and restraint

In some important ways, the NT presents an egalitarian and easy-going model of male-female relationships.

We have seen that women were heavily involved in the ministry. We also see a liberty in the way that men and women are called to relate to one another. In 1 Tim 5:1, Paul writes,

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, ² older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity. (1 Ti 5:1-2)

In the family, gender differences call for modesty, but not for separation. There is no uneasiness about the genders mixing, nor is there a suspicion of women generally.

This even carries over into the area of ministry. In Acts 18 we read about Priscilla and Aquila in their encounter with Apollos. Apollos, we are told,

... began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. (18:24-26)

Notice that apparently both Priscilla and Aquila are involved in teaching Apollos.

Yet elsewhere in the NT there are some evident restraints on the rôle of women. 1 Tim 2:12:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. (1 Ti 2:12)

Also 1 Cor 14:34-35,

... women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. ³⁵ If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Co 14:34-35)

How can we have both? Context is king.

A bi-polar community

In the NT, the Church is a bi-polar community, in the same way that society generally was bi-polar. There was the community of the whole, gathered, body and there was the community of the household.

And the household was fundamental not just socially but theologically.

Parenthood is conceived of as being derived from the character of God himself — within the godhead there is a ‘Father-Son’ relationship, but this also extends to ourselves. We call God ‘Abba’, and we are his children by adoption.

The fifth commandment, “Honour your father and your mother”, therefore has an abiding relevance. In Ephesians 6:1-3 Paul writes,

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ² “Honour your father and mother” — which is the first commandment with a promise — ³ “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” (Eph 6:1-3)

The family was a community within which the faith was lived and taught. So Paul continues in Eph 6:4,

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (Eph 6:4)

This would be the pattern of Jewish families but was also found more generally. The church — or for other purposes, the school — could be a place for instruction. But this was balanced by the home where the children learned the essentials of life and faith from their parents.

Husbands, wives and bishops

The life of the household, however, is focused on the special relationship between husbands and wives. Thus, going back to Eph 5:21-2, we read that we are to be,

... submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²² Wives, [submitting] to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.

And this, really, is the crux of the modern debate.

The egalitarian lobby places the emphasis on v 21: “submitting to one another”. In practice, it argues, the submission of husband to wife is no different from the submission of the wife to the husband.

Howard Marshall takes this line in Discovering Biblical Equality (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 2005). For Marshall, marriage is due to go the same way as slavery. We don’t have slaves submitting to masters, and we won’t have wives submitting to husbands.

Of course, it could be argued that whilst we have abolished slavery, we have not abolished marriage or families. Moreover, given that we still have employers and employees, it could be said that what we have today is the reformation of a relationship, not its abolition.

Nevertheless, the trouble is, especially in the present Anglican context, whilst there is pressure to move away from the biblical model of marriage, there is no corresponding pressure to reform the unbiblical model of ministry.

On the contrary, one of the crucial arguments against the various proposals for alternative provision for those opposed to women bishops is that if a woman bishop’s authority is in any sense diminished then she is ‘not a real bishop’. Submission to her authority in the hierarchy is seen as of the essence, even while submission in the home is being denied.

Of course it could be said if we allow hierarchy in the marriage, why not in the Church? And in fact the NT does encourage us to submit to church leaders (13:17).

But it is difficult to see how we can argue against the Ephesians model of marriage because it is inherently hierarchical (as Marshall does) and at the same time argue for an inherently hierarchical understanding of episcopacy.

Either we have both (if that is what the NT teaches), or we have neither.

Steering a path

The present debate is not straightforward. However, we are in danger of making a difficult situation worse and making things even more imbalanced than they are already.

The home is already weakened as a place of spiritual nurture and is in danger of being made worse.

The question to ask ourselves is this: if we followed the NT pattern of the household and the family, what sort of leadership would emerge in the congregation? And in particular, how would the rôles of men and women in the congregation reflect the pattern of family life?

Theologically, the concerns of the NT arguably focus on preserving the right relationships in the household.

David Broughton-Knox in one of his essays writes,

It would be anomalous if when Christian families come together in the larger grounds of the Christian congregation, heads of homes were subject to the rule of those who, at home, would be under their headship.

I think that is a very good governing principle, though it poses immense challenges to us regarding the home and household.

However, Knox adds a couple of interesting riders:

But apart from this easily understood restriction [in the congregation] which arises from the position in which God the creator has placed men and women with regard to one another in the family setting, the ministry of women is as wide as is that of men, and is largely identical with that of men, because apart from the different endowments and functions which the distinction of sex involves, the abilities of men and women are similar and their opportunities are similar.

And then he goes on:

In the modern organization of the ministry the ordained minister does many things besides that of exercising the dominion of Christ in the full congregation through teaching his word. In fact, some ministers hardly exercise this ministry at all. All these modern ministries are as open to women as to men and there is no point in making artificial distinctions between the same God-given ministry by different places to stand when speaking or different clothes to wear.

And he concludes:

The New Testament does not consider the anomaly when Christian men are incompetent, ill-prepared or unwilling to discharge the teaching ministry. In this anomalous situation it may well be that what is normal must give place to what is beneficial. (D Knox, Church and Ministry, Selected Works [Kingsford NSW: Matthias Media, 2003] 244-5)

The challenge for us is twofold — first, not to do anything in the congregation which would contradict the teaching of the NT about husbands and wives and households and families.

Secondly, to begin to do in our households and families what the NT clearly expects by way of the exercise of responsibility.

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1975 and all that - how a bad decision undermined the debate on women's ordination

Recently I seem to have been caught up in the ‘ordination of women’ debate — perhaps because our diocesan synods are now discussing the draft ‘Measure’ put forward by General Synod to allow for the consecration of women bishops.

Two weeks ago it was the debate on Premier Radio with Christian Rees. This week I visited a parish on the south coast to talk with their PCC about the forthcoming legislation and the theological issues involved.

One of the things I have emphasised in both settings is that there is a debate to be had. I alluded on Premier Radio to my opinion that perhaps the most stupid thing General Synod has ever done was to vote in 1975 that “there are no fundamental objections to the ordination of women to the priesthood”.

Perhaps those in favour of the motion excused themselves by arguing that the key word was ‘fundamental’: there are objections, but they are ‘not fundamental’.

Certainly it would be even more stupid to say there are ‘no objections’. But even the statement that there are ‘no fundamental objections’ is blatantly not a ‘received truth’ in the Anglican Church, least of all was it in 1975.

Thus I doubt very much (though right now I am not in a position to check) that the 1975 vote was unanimous or that the debate consisted of a queue of speakers all agreeing with the motion.

This is why the wording of the motion is so iniquitous. It actually would have been better for the motion to have declared opposition to the ordination of women to be anethema — an approach which the Church has taken on controverted issues in the past. That would have had the effect of recognizing the existence of objections, but declaring them false.

However, the phrasing of the motion — “there are no” — itself creates a falsehood, for clearly there are. It is the attitude of the child playing peek-a-boo who, because it cannot see its mothers face, believes it cannot be seen by its mother. When objections are raised to women’s ordination, the response will be (as was actually stated to me during the PCC meeting), “But the Synod voted that there are no fundamental objections to women’s ordination.” I, and those who share my views, simply cannot ‘be there’ in reality because we don’t actually exist. Synod says so.

This is also why it is always dangerous to vote on a belief, rather than a course of action, and why ‘democracy’ is such a poor tool in such circumstances.

Where action is required, and where there are several choices about what to do, it may, in fact, be appropriate or necessary to take a vote, simply in the interests of doing something rather than nothing.

Even this is not a universal principle. As one writer on leadership observed, a tank in battle is not a place for taking votes. But where there is equality of decision-makers, time for reflection and yet the need for action, a vote may be the most equitable way to proceed.

However, a vote cannot make a thing true, and that ought to have been obvious to the Synod’s governing committees at the time.

Unfortunately, that way of proceeding has taken hold in the whole process, and indeed the 1975 vote is arguably the point at which it all began to go wrong, for the result has been to give credence to the idea that the theological work has been done, when it clearly has not.

In preparation for both the Premier debate and the south coast visit, I read a couple of books on the issue putting forward the ‘pro’ case. For the former it was Discovering Biblical Equality : Complementarity Without Hierarchy, edited by Pierce and Groothuis, and for the latter The Gender Agenda, by Lis Goddard and Clare Hendry.

The one thing you could not say after reading both these books is that the issues are ‘not fundamental’.

The other thing you could not say is that the issues are entirely resolved, though they may look that way from the safety of our own ‘constituencies’.

Both Goddard and Hendry are members of AWESOME, a network for ordained Anglican evangelical women, and during the writing of their book, which is a dialogue from different perspectives — Goddard for and Hendry against women as incumbents in churches — they both went to a network conference. Reflecting on this, Hendry makes an interesting observation:

Some folk [present] seemed to be totally unaware that there are other views on headship held by ‘sane and normal’ people, and that for some groups this is not the minority view. [...] It is important that women [in AWESOME] who have a high view of the Bible can take the view that I and others hold about male headship, and that this is a legitimate position. But I didn’t always get that impression from some of the folk at the conference. (135)

Now of course the same would be true if one went to a Forward in Faith rally or a gathering of Reform. We must not pretend that any section of the Church of England takes a truly dispassionate view on this subject.

But that is the problem. The Church of England has enshrined in its legislation the principle that both the acceptance of women’s ordination and its rejection are legitimate Anglican views, to be embraced and treated equally. Yet the foundation for its legislation in this regard would appear to be sand rather than solid rock — a decision by majority vote that a view held by many Anglicans lacked any substance, even whilst the very fact that a vote was taken proved that it had its firm adherents.

The present Anglican position, therefore, must be deemed either incoherent or dishonest. It is incoherent to declare that a viewpoint lacks either justification or support and then to declare that, nevertheless, it is on a par with the truth. Alternatively, it is dishonest to be saying that everyone will be treated equally when, in fact, there is self-evidently no possibility that this will be the case.

Those of us who have hoped the Church of England’s governing bodies would honour the commitments given since 1993 have probably not been clear enough ourselves about the realities of the situation. But we have taken heart from the fact that ‘incoherence’ is what the Church of England does so well.

Unfortunately, as the recent creation of the Ordinariate suggests, it is something which even the Church of England can only do for so long if the pressures become great enough.

And alongside incoherence we have had dishonesty — I refer to the exclusion of traditionalists from senior office, at first doubtless in response to subtle pressures, but now openly and overtly. Yet as with the pressures for Anglo-Catholics, this can only be maintained for so long, and the proposed legislation reflects the need to ‘move on’.

It is a principle in law that equal parties should be treated equally. Anyone reading the draft Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure will see that it establishes two classes of Anglican — those who will simply be able to go about their church business from year to year without the need to justify their continuance, and those who will regularly have to review and revise their arrangements with the institution.

Those accepting of women bishops will never be asked to consider whether they might be wrong. Those who are not will constantly be having to justify their position to themselves and to others.

Surely no secular legislator would allow such a situation! But in the Church it seems we can — and why not, when one point of view has neither a basis nor a constituency?

John Richardson
21 May 2011

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"When morality becomes literary criticism" - a Humanist take on the Unbelievable debate

An interesting take on the Unbelievable broadcast with myself and Christina Rees. Morality is so much easier when we just 'do what is moral'.

Link here.

Sadly, my debate with Richard Norman on the question whether we can be 'good without God' is no longer available, but some questions about atheism and morality are posed on this blog here.

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The Faces of Nationalism

I couldn't help noticing the similarities between these two pictures, the first from the Daily Mail showing Irish Nationalists the other from the Independent showing the English variety.

Apart from the prevailing colours of the flags, there does seem to be a remarkable similarity between the two, which may be because they are basically saying the same thing: "This is our country, and its been ruined by foreign influences and we want it back so it can be pure again."

Somehow, that always seems to bring out the rally-attending, flag-waving and arm-raising patriot in us.

So it's goodnight from him ...

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Things that make you go "Hmmm"

I feel I ought to comment on this, but I am rendered speechless at several levels:

Archbishop allows Freemason to be bishop

I couldn't help noticing the irony in this paragraph, though:

Freemasonry ... requires its members to declare a belief in a “supreme being” and to undergo elaborate rituals.

So not that different from the Church of England, I suppose.


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Podcast: Debate with Christina Rees on Women's Ministry in the Anglican Church

The podcast for this is now available and can be downloaded here (I think!).

If that fails, try going here and follow the links for 'Unbelievable'.

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Is this Anglican Evangelicalism?

I know it's an old chestnut, but it has come up again in another context, and — perhaps precisely because it is such a chestnut — it is worth trying to get it right. This is therefore the 'definition so far', with a special emphasis on Anglican evangelicalism. Comments are invited in the spirit of clarification.

Evangelicalism has at heart the proclamation to all:

1. That the fundamental problem with the world is the sin that separates us from God.

2. That sinners are personally under God's wrath and face Christ's judgement (Rev 6:15-17).

3. That out of God's great love, Christ died to reconcile us to God and God to us (Article II).

4. That sin is dealt with entirely, and only, by the death of Christ on the cross, whereby he bore the punishment for our sins (Isa 53:6) and overcame the powers of evil, delivering us from wrath and preparing us for the coming Kingdom.

5. That a right relationship with God (salvation) is found only, but entirely and immediately, through faithful trust in his word to us that [we are] sinners are reconciled to God by the death of his Son.

6. That ultimately all the blessings of God, and in the first instance his Holy Spirit (Gal 3:14), are given to those who, believing this gospel message, are born again.

7. That Scripture is the vehicle in which God's word of the gospel is presented and preserved, and through which it is proclaimed as God's living word to every generation (1 Cor 15:3,4; Gal 3:8; 1 Tim 4:13, cf also, for Anglicans, the Prayer Book Ordinal admonition to those about to be ordained priest).

As an Anglican, I would also want to add that baptism is the tangible sign of these truths and of God's promises, so that those who believe ought to receive baptism, in obedience to Christ, as an outward assurance of the gospel, and those who are baptized ought to believe what the sign of baptism displays to them (Article XXVII).

NB this is NOT intended to be a complete definition of Christianity, but rather of those understandings and emphases that mark out evangelical Christianity. (It is quite another debate whether other forms of 'Christianity' are thereby true or false.)

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Encouraging the next generation of Evangelical Anglican leaders

Bookings for the Anglican Evangelical Junior Clergy Conference are coming in steadily, and we are glad to be able to announce that Professor Glynn Harrison will be joining us for part of the event.

Glynn is a Bishop’s Advisor on clergy selection and a member of the Crown Nominations Commission. He has a particular concern for the inclusion of Evangelicals in the senior leadership of the Church, and so will be able to speak to the Conference about both ‘ends’, as it were, of the selection process.

The aim of the Conference is to identify and encourage the next generation of Anglican Evangelical clergy leaders who will take on the strategic challenges for the Church of England of the mid twenty-first century. For some, the challenge will be to act as bishops.

The anticipated cost of the Conference is £115. To book, please send a cheque for £15 to Revd John Richardson, 39 Oziers, Elsenham, Bishop’s Stortford, HERTS CM22 6LS. To inquire further, please use the e-mail link at the bottom of the left hand column on this page. See the St Mark’s website for details of facilities and accommodation.

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Debate this afternoon with Christina Rees on Premier Christian Radio

As mentioned previously on this blog, Premier Christian Radio are broadcasting the debate (more like a discussion, really) between myself and Christina Rees on the subject of women in ministry.

The broadcast will be at 2.30pm, and you can find various ways of listening by following this link here.

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Women in ministry — a story of personal frustration

But perhaps not quite the story you might be expecting. Early last week I was contacted by Justin Brierley at Premier Christian Radio, who runs a great little programme called ‘Unbelievable’, asking whether I would come on and debate ‘women in ministry’ with Christina Rees of WATCH.

As it happened, I was about to embark on what I knew would be an incredibly stressful trip abroad, so I suggested a couple of other names, but they couldn’t do it, so in the end it came back to me.

Plan B actually looked good on paper — do the New Directions board-meeting in London on Thursday, stay overnight with friends and then go on to Premier on Friday. Unfortunately, things began to go wrong as soon as I got to Homerton station.

First one train was cancelled, then a second, then the third was ten minutes late. By the time I got to Highbury I ought to have been at Pimlico, but at least I was moving and had reached the London Underground.

Then, one stop along the Victoria line, everything literally came to a halt. The only realistic option by this stage was to get a taxi, which I did, but had to get the cash to pay for it first. And of course thanks to the underground being out (including, by now, the Piccadilly line) the traffic, even in the London Congestion Zone, was horrendous.

By this time I’d given up trying to tell Justin when I might arrive, but I finally turned up at 2.30, several pounds lighter in both respects.

And so to the interview. Unfortunately, this rather turned out like my perambulations around London — never quite getting to the point but expending a lot of energy in the process. I’ll put up a link when the broadcast goes out (a week today) and people can judge for themselves, but I came away more frustrated by this than by the breakdowns on the trains.

But it is not just the radio debate which frustrates me. In preparation, I had taken away with me Discovering Biblical Equality : Complementarity Without Hierarchy, which has contributions from, amongst others, Gordon Fee, and I Howard Marshall — both people whose scholarship I respect. However, I really felt that the arguments it presented were just not terribly good. Marshall’s conclusion was, I thought, typical. Basically, in Ephesians 5 Paul does really advocate submission from wife to husband, but,

Paul wrote as he did about marriage because in his world he did not know any other form than the patriarchal. (204)

So dear old Paul could, under the revelation of the gospel and the inspiration of the Spirit, get his head around laying off with circumcision and food laws, sacrifices and holy days, indeed the whole Law of Moses, but he hit the buffers when it came to families and households.

This is not to say there is no debate to be had. On the contrary, there is much to debate, not least because (as I said in a previous post about other matters) on principle if “two men say they’re Jesus, one [or both] of them must be wrong”. And certainly both sides can’t be right about women’s ordination.

But there is another elephant in the room when it comes to ordination itself — certainly within Anglican circles. For as I said in the interview, the deacons of the Church of England are nowhere to be found in the New Testament, nor are the bishops the same, and even the priests are clearly somewhat different from New Testament presbyters. If you are a devotee of later tradition, you will perhaps see this as a proper development, but if you are a thoroughgoing evangelical you will surely be wanting to ask serious questions in this area too.

Part of our problem, therefore, is that at the same time as we are rewriting the book on male-female relationships we are unwilling to confront our institutional structures. Indeed, one of the striking things about Discovering Biblical Equality was its repeated antipathy to any sort of metaphorical hierarchy between men and women, whilst having little or nothing to say (at least in the bits I read) about the literal hierarchy to be found in denominations like the Church of England.

If you are to allow some element of the latter, however, then you cannot surely exclude the former simply on the grounds that hierarchy in personal relationships is fundamentally antithetical to the gospel! Yet in the index of DBE, the entry for ‘hierarchy’ simply says ‘See male leadership position’ — something of a blind spot, I would suggest (though not quite on a par with the entry in our old Yellow Pages which read ‘Boring — see Civil Engineers’).

Meanwhile, I was intrigued to discover on the AWESOME website some statistics about women in church leadership. According to one survey published in Quadrant for Christian Research, female ministers generally were most likely to: come from the Salvation Army, or Methodist or URC Churches and be theologically Liberal, Low Church or Broad.

Within the Church of England itself, on the Register of the Evangelical Patrons’ Consultative Council (which brings together bodies who have ‘patronage’ rights regarding parish appointments and which therefore seeks names of potential candidates), in 2004 there were twelve women’s names (13%), and in 2010 just seven (9%).

Some may say this is not surprising, given the views of Conservative Evangelicals like myself. But the fact is that we are a small minority compared with those who identify themselves as evangelicals in favour of women’s ordination, and now consecration (including many in New Wine or associated with the Alpha movement).

The problem, which I have highlighted before, is that this endorsement doesn’t actually seem to be feeding through on the ground. There are not large numbers of evangelical women clergy — certainly not when compared with men — and one is therefore left wondering whether either the arguments of egalitarians are not actually persuading people to step forward for ordination or (and here is the real worry for me) that the arguments are, in fact, essentially liberal in their formulation, and that therefore those whom they persuade do not, ultimately, self-identify as evangelical.

John Richardson

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“Right becomes wrong and left become right”

I am still immensely enjoying Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, as I blogged about last week. As I continue to read, however, I am struck by a recurring theme regarding the makers of Western culture about whom James writes.

Many of them have been victims of one, or sometimes even both, of the two secular ideologies which dominated so much of the last century — to the right, Nazism, and to the left, Marxism. Almost inevitably, these individuals come across as tragic, and indeed are often heroic.

Yet at the same time there are others, for the most part no less talented or dedicated to their particular field, who have actually lent their support precisely to these ideologies. And this surely raises some interesting questions about the whole ‘cultural’ enterprise.

Here we have people who can rightly be regarded as cultured intellectuals. Indeed, they are themselves culturally creative. Yet sometimes they are entirely blind to movements and forces inimical to human, and therefore cultural, flourishing.

It has to be said, moreover, that this is particularly noticeable regarding attitudes on the ‘left’. Here, it seems, people of considerable intellect have, nevertheless, been constantly willing to justify self-evident wrongs and to deny every allegation of moral deviance, in a manner that seems entirely at variance with their own evident capacity for understanding and analysis in other respects.

Thus people who really should have known better have supported, at various times, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and even Pol Pot.

To go beyond James’s own examples, many of us remember Jane Fonda’s visit to, and endorsement of, North Vietnam in the 1960s. And what of the World Council of Churches’ support for violent ‘liberation’ movements in the Third World?

Part of the picture is, of course, that the political left tends to align itself with causes that appeal to the best of human instincts — the desire to help the physically poor and the socially oppressed.

The problem is that organizations and individuals who have been able to talk the right talk in this regard have often walked a very different walk. There may even, as seems to be the case with Mao Zedong, be a transition from a good start to a truly disastrous finish.

Nevertheless, it is a lesson of history that intellectual and cultural brilliance is by no means a guarantee that the individual will possess an accurate moral compass, or pay any attention to it even if they do.

It should also, however, be an encouragement to the rest of us, who do not possess such brilliance, not to be intimidated into silence. Sometimes it is possible to wonder whether, given the mental abilities of those who lend their support to one dubious-looking cause or another, the Emperor for whom they are cheering really is wearing the fantastic outfit they describe, rather than being as stark-naked as the objective evidence suggests.

Reading through the ‘broadsheet’ media today, the Western intellectual opponents of the West, for example, seem to be overwhelming both in their numbers and in their evident learning. “Surely,” we find ourselves thinking, “they must be onto something.” And so we go on listening to the argument that the real threat to human flourishing today comes not from the radicalization of Muslims or the growing brute economic power of China, but from America, or from our own history.

It is said by clever people, and it is said well — so who are you, or who am I, to contradict it?

At times like this it is good to remember that clever, erudite people have been notoriously wrong about such things in the past. They really have done the same for mass murderers and political sociopaths. And sometimes what we need is common sense, not intellectual brilliance.

The title for this post comes from the Dire Straits song, Ride Across the River. There is another Dire Straits line I am fond of quoting as an antidote to the modern mindset, which comes from Industrial Disease: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.”

Of course, it is possible that they are both wrong, but certainly during the 1990s it became possible to scandalize quite intelligent people with the first suggestion: “Who are we to say who is wrong?” became the typical response, even when it was self-evidently true that someone was.

But it is this same moral certainty about the uncertainty of our moral judgement that allows perfectly sane commentators and journalists to condemn ‘Islamophobia’, for example, without ever coming down hard against Islam, or to judge the West by ‘Western’ standards whilst excusing the otherwise unpardonable when it is part of a non-Western ‘culture’.

There is, however, a third Dire Straits line, again from Industrial Disease, that comes to mind at this point: “Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.” When the intellect fails us practically, then only the truly practical person can help us. The wise person in such circumstances may well not be the clever one. They will just be the one who can accurately see and declare what is going on.

John Richardson

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