From the editor’s desk

Anglicanism's toppling triangle

Collisions between immovable objects and unstoppable forces are never pretty, as the Church of England seems anxious to demonstrate. Its General Synod heard a desperate plea this week from Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to pull back from the confrontation over the ordination of women bishops that could see the Church fragmenting into at least three components. These three – Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical and liberal – are modern versions of the three varieties of Anglican churchmanship that have existed side by side, at times comfortably and at times painfully, ever since the shape of the Elizabethan Settlement emerged in the sixteenth century. Now this Anglican “comprehensiveness” seems to have reached its sternest test.

Having decided to ordain women in 1992, a move to open the Anglican episcopacy to them was inevitable. About 40 per cent of Anglican clergy are now female, and some are as well qualified for promotion as their male equivalents. To cope with those who could not accept female ordination on theo­logical or biblical grounds, special arrangements were made so that such clergy, and their parishes, need never come into contact with a woman priest if they did not want to. Most of those who took advantage of this were Anglo-Catholics, and they expected similar arrangements to be made so that they could insulate themselves from women bishops. But this is proving unacceptable to the proponents of women bishops, for the understandable reason that it seems to establish that such women bishops are not proper bishops but at best ­second class, at worst invalid.

There is also a strong objection among conservative Evangelicals, the second of the three elements in the comprehensiveness mix, that the “headship” of women over men in the Church is ruled out by Scripture. Archbishop Williams is probably right that the only way of holding these three elements together is for one or more to climb down. Given that it is the proponents – broadly known as liberal – of women bishops who want to change the way things are at present, the onus is on them. But there is an air of liberal intolerance, not to say triumphalism, about some of their attitudes. It is a characteristic of intolerant liberals that they regard their opponents not just as mistaken but as morally wrong. In this case, the implied charge is misogyny. Arguments about biblical headship on the one hand and the tradition of the Church on the other are dismissed as cloaks for mere prejudice.

As comprehensiveness is at the heart of Anglicanism, its breakdown could produce a fundamental change in Anglican identity. Without a brake being applied by Anglo-Catholics and conservative Evangelicals, Anglican liberals would be free to dictate the agenda – and not just over issues like homosexuality but also, say, over relations with Rome. Such relations would be fundamentally altered if the most Rome-ward ­facing section were to leave Anglicanism altogether and take advantage of the papal offer of an ordinariate – which would be Roman Catholic doctrinally but Anglican culturally. Some would say that there was an historical logic at work here, and that comprehensiveness itself was always inherently unstable. But there is a price. Anglicanism as we have known it, as a triangle of balancing forces and a Christian symbol of unity in diversity, would be no more.