Lazy atheism and bishops

If that title doesn't get your attention, what will? This post flags up an article that appeared today in the Guardian which has some interesting things to say about the Church of England from a friendly-atheist perspective. But, oh dear, Simon Jenkins gives an outing to several lazy atheist myths on the way. So I propose to comment on those first before having a look at the interesting and constructive things in this article.

So, first up, he says:

Atheism fields no armies, but Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam most certainly do. Never was a bigger lie told than that the Pope has no divisions.

What? Surely he can't be serious? Atheism fields no armies? Yet the armed forces of the PRC and of North Korea serve officially atheist regimes [not to mention the officially secular -and so kinda atheist- armies of the USA and France and India etc etc ...] ... and I can't think of any armed force currently engaged as a Christian army unless perhaps 'Christian' is doing duty as a kind of ethnic label, and ditto Hindu. I suspect the same is true of Judaism since Israel is officially a secular state and the most religious of Jews tend to be against the state of Israel... So not the easy goal he thought, potentially and own goal in fact.

It's good knock about rhetoric but it's flawed, I think:

Under Tony Blair's unequal extradition treaty, if Dr Williams opposes the appointment he could be "extraordinarily rendered" from Lambeth Palace to a New Jersey courthouse, thus fulfilling the Pilgrim Fathers' wildest dreams.

I take the point but I think that expressing an opinion is not covered, and the main point is that the ABofC has no power except that of moral suasion to oppose the appointment. He may advise that it is not a good idea but he has no other means to oppose it; the provinces of the Anglican communion are independent and held together voluntarily.

And this is a bit of selective reading if ever I saw it.

Rustle through the cuttings and you will see that almost all the Church's bad news involves bishops. Their appointments are controversial, if not cataclysmic, be they leftwing, rightwing, gay or, worst of all, women. From "Bishop John" of Reading to Bishop Gene of New Hampshire and Bishop Katharine of Nevada, from Hereford's Mappa Mundi to Lincoln's vendetta and the impenetrable faction-fighting at Ripon, Trollope himself could not catalogue the mischief caused to the Anglican church by the episcopacy.

Well, it's debatable about the bad news and proportions thereof. But more importantly it takes for granted that the media's view of things ecclesiastical is the important one. But let's think about that for a moment, shall we? The press and other news media go for bishop stories precisely because bishops are the nearest thing that the press thinks we have to celebrities and politicians and the best kind of news is 'bad' news. Given those two factors, it would be interesting if we found that there were not a lot of 'bad' news bishop stories. Case not proven, I think. In any case I suspect that there are probably quite a lot of the bad news stories that don't involve bishops and that the episcopacy probably causes less mischief on balance than other members of the church, it's just that when they do, it's bigger news with bigger consequences. And that's allowing for the fact that I have personal experience of episcopal 'fallen-ness'!

With a faulty analysis comes a faulty solution:

bishops seem to be accidents waiting to happen. Dr Williams should admit as much and abolish the episcopacy. He would save £18m and no end of trouble worldwide.

Abolish bishops and the accidents waiting to happen devolves to figures that would take their place in the spotlight of media scrutiny, so perhaps keeping them and giving them good media training is a better solution. That's without considering that some of us actually think that episcopacy isn't inherantly a bad idea and could even be good if done right. The other things don't require bishops to be abolished: I have long advocated that all clergy should be paid the same and that the only differentials should be expenses of office. If the idea is to pay people so that they do not have to have another income, I can't see the logic of paying 'senior appointments' more, especially as we should be vocation-motivated. If the stipend is a grant /enablement to pursue a church-centred vocation, then need not the worldly valuing of an appointment should be at the heart of financial compensation policies. Part of the point of equalising the stipends of parish clergy was to eliminate, as I understood it, the unseemly scramble for better paid preferments and to enable people to pursue vocations to areas of a more 'missional' character without undue concern for the financial implications. This has largely been successful, I would judge and needs now to be extended to so-called senior appointments. That would achieve the savings -though I gather that they are unlikely to be as much as 18m quid under either scenario.

Then the guy says this:

The Church of England's safety valve is covert schism, its most effective discipline indiscipline. Yet its diplomacy is lumbering and hidebound. Lambeth still cannot make its peace with Rome, as have the Lutherans, or with Wesleyan dissent.

I really don't understand this: the Anglican church in Europe is in full communion with north European Lutheranism, and I'm not aware that either of us has entirely patched up the orgument with Rome, nor will we ever agree on the role of the pope, I suspect which for both Anglicans and Lutherans continues to be the big issue. And, as the CofE is actively and with some success, on the whole, managing raprochement with Methodism in Britain ... ?

So having raised the problems, what is there of value in this story? Well, there's a few things I would like to say that it is worth hearing from our friendly disagree-ers.

It will be no surprise, given what I wrote a few paragraphs back, that I think we should 'hear' this.

The Presbyterians were right. Bishops are a noisome and bureaucratic pestilence. They were the agents of ecclesiastical power when that power was many days' ride away from provincial England. They shared with monasteries vast territorial wealth, survived the Reformation and, even as the Church declined nationally, proliferated regionally, taxing subordinate parishes to maintain their style of living and governing.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. I believe in the bene esse of episcopacy: that is to say that if you don't have bishops, their equivalent tends to get invented: people who handle trans-local relationships between churches and perhaps represent groups of churches tend to appear. The way they are appointed and hold office may differ and the amount of doctrinal or ecclesiological freight they are invested with may vary but essentially, you have an 'apostolic ministry' of some kind.

I would say that we could learn something from the Moravians here. If I've observed things rightly, in the UK they have bishops who are ordinary parish clergy most of the time. I guess in CofE terms they are a bit like area/rural deans in terms of the way they hold two offices together. The real problem, as I see it, with CofE bishops is that we have the medieval princeling model still in mind. So we have too few of them. I would say that we should have loads of them, tiny dioceses but bishops who are more earthed in smaller local communities, paid the same as the rest of the clergy but with a wider responsibility for the pastoral care and ministerial development of the other clergy.

So when Simon Jenkins writes...

The middle ages, when everyone was supposedly an active Christian, coped with 20 bishops, and only six were added before the Victorian era. In 1845, there were 30; by 1945 the number had risen to 90. Today there are 114 bishops and suffragans. There is even talk of a third archbishop. This is missionary creep. I was once sent a diocesan agenda proposing an increase in head office staff of 24 and a matching cut of 24 in parochial clergy.

The problem is not how many bishops, it's how they function and how they are resourced and more widely than that, how they have been seen culturally within and outwith the church. It is worth reading Gareth Miller's radical proposal for a new provincial structure which I reproduced on my blog a little while back. It seems to me that he outlines some structures that along with my suggestion about stipends, could actually work. Oh and incidently, I think that a church with more ordained deacons [most of those currently exercising the office of Reader are, in all but name, functioning, in Anglican terms, diaconally, let's recognise that] but fewer stipended clerge might be part of what we do. Making room for more bi-vocationality in varying degrees from voluntary to fractional posts is part of the solution. Who knows even bishops who are part time teachers, or welders job-sharing episcopacy with a spouse or one or two other clergy.

So, I want to thank Simon Jenkins for raising the issues, even if sometimes with a degree of wrongly-informed rhetoric. It is important for us to see how others see us, and where they have a point, to address the concerns.

I just can't work out how to get the CofE as a whole to listen to these concerns.

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Filed in: atheism, CofE, bishops, armies