An Unsuccessful Compromise in the CofE

Kevin has commented on the Presbyterians’ recent decision to approve of practicing homosexual clergy, a move that will only divide an already divided body — still divided even though many of the conservative members hived off decades ago into bodies like the Presbyterian Church in America . The Anglicans in England are beginning to institutionalize even more divisive changes, as the BBC and  the Daily Telegraph report.

The Church of England’s General Synod rejected a proposal by the two archbishops to try to give traditionalist members — who include both Evangelicals indistinguishable from Baptists and Anglo-Catholics who use (illegally) the Roman rite in their churches — a little distance from women bishops when the CofE starts ordaining them, as it will. It was a compromise that would make no one happy but that, the archbishops clearly hoped, the majority could accept for the sake of unity.

Theologically, the  suggestion was absurd, as the archbishops surely knew. It would not have changed the real relation of traditionalist clergy and people to their female bishops, but only put a male bishop in her place so they wouldn’t have to see her.

She would still be the final authority in her diocese, still the father of the family, if you will. That violates the conservative Evangelicals’ understanding of headship. The male bishop would still be ordained by and in communion with bishops who are in communion with her, meaning that he and therefore the traditionalists he serves would be in communion with her too.  That violates the Anglo-Catholics’ understanding of the sacraments and church order. The whole idea’s no good.

But that’s the way of ecclesiastical compromises of this sort and at this level. They paper over real divisions in the hope that someday everything will work out — as it will, but only because the stronger side will eventually wear down or drive out the weaker. Conservative American Episcopalians could tell their English brethren about this.

A Catholic friend who studies the Protestant churches in northern Europe is fond of quoting Lenin’s “The worse, the better” in relation to the traditionalists. They need to know where they stand and be forced to make a clear decision to be in or out and not, as the archbishops’ proposal would have left them doing, pretending to be both in and out.