Mephistopheles knocks on the door

When something isn't sustainable, at some point it won't be sustained

This is by way of a quick follow-on to the last post, which has (by my lowly standards!) gone a bit viral - hello and welcome to new readers! Let me begin with a picture of Joanna Moncrieff, who is something of a hero of mine, and the key thinker for the first two chapters of my PhD:

Here is someone of substantial intellectual achievement and great moral courage. I emphasise these things because some reactions to my piece didn’t appreciate that my argument is principally about a culture, not about particular people. Although I put that point in my subtitle I accept that I didn’t spell things out as clearly as was needed - I apologise for that. As ever, these essays are as much about me trying to work things out as about me presenting fully developed conclusions.

My point might be summarised like this: women bishops are a good thing, but you can have too much of a good thing. The Church of England seems to have lost a proper sense of what a Bishop is for - and part of that loss is bound up with a surrendering to cultural norms, including around the norm, legally driven, for equality between the sexes. My concern is that in adopting those cultural norms we have weakened ourselves as an institution. Now this language of weakness can be critiqued as implicitly gendered, yet that is precisely the point. I do think that there is something here about the maintenance of boundaries and, therefore, the capacity and willingness to maintain those boundaries (which in turn is linked to the capacity for violence, which is gendered) and that the Church of England has seen such collapse over the last several decades because it has lost the capacity to defend itself against the wider society (and that defence is as much intellectual as anything else). There was a comment on Twitter to the effect that what I’m describing might best be referred to as ‘demasculinisation’ rather than ‘feminisation’. I like that, but I wanted to point to Helen Andrews’ work, and she uses the latter term. Ecclesiologically, ‘flying bishops’ are an aberration that cannot be sustained in the long run, and I suspect that long run is drawing to a close.

Hence my reference to Mephistopheles. I see the initial decision to ordain women to the priesthood in 1994, however correct in ultimate theological substance, as rooted in a political compromise that involved the conscious deception of, in particular, the traditional catholic wing of the CofE (see here for a bit more on why I say that). WATCH is clearly gearing up for a fight with the intention of eliminating the traditional catholic constituency and when that fight comes in to the open decisions are going to have to be made… and we are back to boundaries and violence, and the difference between male fighting and female. The deceptions will be brought out into the open and the church will be forced to decide if the traditional position can remain within the CofE or not.

All I would say at this point is that if WATCH ‘wins’ it will be rather Pyrrhic. I want to stay…