Storyteller’s World

I made a mistake this morning. In my enthusiasm for Mary Magdalene, whose feast this is, I blithely tweeted that she was the first apostle sent by the risen Christ. So why not women bishops? I asked.

(If you have been following what we choose to call the ‘debate’ on this, you’ll know that for some of the opponents of women bishops, the idea that Jesus chose only men to be apostles, and that the apostles are the basis of the Church’s ordained ministry, is a convincing argument that women cannot be bishops, and no one can say different.)

Someone who follows my tweets immediately responded with a biblical reference which they believe to be conclusively anti-women bishops. Followed by claims to be unashamedly and faithfully following the word of God, rather than the word of man, and that was all they had to say on the matter.

I am going to try not to do theological discussion via Twitter in future. I very much like the discipline of trying to communicate meaningfully in 140 characters or less: a tweet is like the haiku of the internet. But theology, I have learned, needs to be more nuanced. Or maybe just prolix.

A, (if you are reading this), I have not responded to you on Twitter, because I don’t want to argue with you or for us not to be friends. But don’t you see that the Bible is surprisingly silent about whether we should appoint women bishops in the Church of England? (I’ve read it, I know.) In fact, it doesn’t actually say anything about women bishops at all. So any texts or passages we think have any bearing on the subject, it’s on the basis of our, or someone else’s, human interpretation. We have to find other ways of choosing and justifying the interpretation we adopt, than simply claiming it is God’s own. We have to engage in the much more demanding work of thinking about the whole revelation of God, rather than a series of texts which we (or, more likely, someone else) have decided are relevant.

As with the parables, God has left us to work out the truth, and what we do about it, for ourselves. I guess he wants to treat us like grown-up children. God knows why, we don’t often behave like it.

Doing some research on J. M. Neale (1818-66), I came across the talk he gave to the Camden Society in 1841, on the History of Pews, from which this is the first paragraph:

The subject on which the Committee have requested me to offer, this evening, some remarks to the Society, is one so interwoven with the internal arrangement of our churches, so directly bearing on the reverent performance of our services, and so powerfully influencing, not the taste alone, but the devotional feelings of our worshippers, that, uninviting as it may at first sight appear, we are in fact deeply interested in it. And I was the more willing to lay before you whatever information I may have been able to procure on it, because Pews have never yet found an historian. Nor need we wonder at this. For what is the HISTORY OF PEWS, but the history of the intrusion of human pride, and selfishness, and indolence, into the worship of GOD? a painful tale of our downward progress from the reformation to the revolution: the view of a constant struggle to make Canterbury approximate to Geneva, to assimilate the church to the conventicle. In all this contest, the introduction of Pews, as trifling a thing as it may seem, has exercised no small influence for ill; and an equally powerful effect for good would follow their extirpation. Hence it is that, from the first moment of our existence as a Society, we have declared an internecine war against them: that we have denounced them as eye-sores and heart-sores; that we have recommended their eradication, in spite of all objection, and at whatever expense: that we have never listened to a plea for the retention of one; for we knew well that, if we could not destroy them, they would destroy us.

Yes! out with them!