Without Precedent - Geoffrey Kirk

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matter, like others which were deemed unstylishly contentious, had better be avoided. “His clear preference,” wrote Gary Bennett of Robert Runcie, in the fateful Crockford’s Preface, “is for men of liberal disposition and a moderately Catholic style which is not taken to the point of having firm principles. If in addition they have a good appearance and are articulate over the media, he is prepared to overlook a certain theological deficiency.”14 “I had to change,” said Rowan Williams to Angela Tilby of his early objections to women’s ordination, “after looking around at my side and seeing the company I was keeping.”15 The result was that the only serious theological study on the subject of women’s ordination available to English readers, then and now, was an American translation of the work of a German priest published in San Francisco in 1988.16 At a conference in St. George’s College Windsor in 2000, on the then fashionable “Doctrine of Reception,” I asked Dr. Mary Tanner (sometime Moderator of the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission and head of the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity and drafter of the 1988 Bishops’ Report) her opinion of the book. She had not read it.

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      A word of warning: This book is not an attempt to argue against the ordination of women to the priesthood or the episcopate, in the Church of England or in any other church. The Orders of the church are not at the disposal of Popes, Councils, synods or debating chambers of any kind. They are a gift from the Lord. We may seek to illustrate the nature and explain the purpose of that donné—we can seek “to justify the ways of God to man”—but we cannot properly argue for or against it, for the simple reason that it is not ours either to attack or to defend. Historically speaking, the three-fold orders of bishop, priest, and deacon emerged in their enduring form around the end of the fourth century, along with the catholic creeds and the canon of scripture. These are the three legs of the stool (not the trio of scripture, tradition, and reason, recently foisted on poor Hooker) on which the church sits. To alter any of them in any way is a serious and dangerous matter.

      All three are now under concerted attack, not from the critics of the church, but from its own leaders. The creeds have been rendered susceptible to meanings and interpretations very far from the conceivable intention of their original drafters. The very notion of canonicity, in scripture as in other areas, has been called into question, and documents of a very different character given equivalence with the received texts. These are serious matters to which the Church of England is ill equipped to give an ecclesial response. But changes to the Orders of the church are of another dimension. Such changes objectify opinion in ecclesial structures. That is why the arguments for, and the assumptions underlying, such an innovation demand the closest possible scrutiny.

      1: Truth and Principle

      If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.

      —Professor Michael Nolan

      Christianity is an historical religion. By that is meant not simply that like all things else it has a history; but that it is peculiarly related to a particular historical moment. Christianity relates to Christ. By that is meant not merely a notional savior (a “Christ figure” as one might say), but Jesus of Nazareth. The post-Christian theologian Daphne Hampson, in her book Theology and Feminism, puts the matter very clearly:

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