Janet Trisk College of the Transfiguration Grahamstown, South Africa Janet@imaginet.co.za Jeffrey John and the Future of Liberal Anglicanism David A. Hart reflects on the issues behind the recent controversy over the forced resignation of a gay bishop designate I am of the same generation as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former bishop- designate of Reading (surely Oscar Wilde must be having a heavenly wry grin at his aborted destination). Like Jeffrey John and his present boyfriend, about twenty or thirty of us a year ‘went up’ to similar north Oxford colleges to study theology straight (or were we? that became our abiding question and preoccupation ...) from school, with the intention of going on usually to the Anglican or Roman Catholic priesthood.
Oxford in the 1970s was not exactly a pro-heterosexual institution. Not only theological colleges, of every churchmanship, but also nearly all the traditional university colleges were singlesex institutions, where you could be reported and/or fined for providing nocturnal hospitality of any description to the opposite sex. Here was the great traditional institution of learning that daunted those of us arriving from humble state schools with a reverence for the Platonic academy for middle-class English gentles in the making. The University was presided over by those intellectual giants we worshipped. One of the heads of college regularly took his guests around the college quadrangles ‘to admire the Anglo-Jackson’; another, an ‘Question: when is a homophobe not a bigot?
Answer: when he is motivated by sincere religious convictions.
That is now official doctrine in the Church of England...’ introductions were among the most gruelling and penetrating interviews of my educational life!
W. H. Auden prowled the streets with his weddingcake face searching for young drinking companions with whom he could share his latest odes, and the Precentor of the Cathedral, where many of us were acolytes and servers, invited us to post-communion cocktails in his mediaeval priory rooms carpeted throughout with white fur...until that is he was forced to take a parish in the West country after an affair with a German student organist led to lurid headlines in the student newspaper ‘Cherwell’, announcing ‘Jackboot Sex in Cloister!’ The young fogey A. N. Wilson was also studying for the priesthood at the same college as Jeffrey, when he was not cycling round Oxford in a trilby on a tricycle: eccentricity was a prerequisite for acceptance in this place and homosexuality was one among many of its Canon Jeffrey John ™anifestations, with its schools of camp effeminacy, and its thriving new culture of pubs and night clubs...The Stage Club, just over the Playhouse, was a common venue for theologians to meet over a gin after their college Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a place where they could let their hair down and experiment with their sexuality in an age still free of the fears of AIDS and of sexual stigma generally.
The head of the theological college, now Lord Archbishop of York, had been appointed to ‘clean up’ its image after his Bp Richard Holloway, former Primus, Scottish Episcopal Church predecessor left under a cloud, which was ‘Face to Faith’, Guardian, 28 June 2003 commonly believed to have involved hearing his students’ confessions in his Anglican cleric and patristic scholar, sat deliberately at the entrance desk at the Bodleian Library to admire the new quota of freshmen every October, inviting a number to join him at High Table, introducing them to his fellow dons as if they were his latest conquest. As one of his willing but relatively clueless victims, I have to say those bedroom, wearing the required stole but not very much else. The reputation of the House (as it was known) was debated in the newly-created Synod of the Church of England, during which one of the protagonists announced that he had inspected the college accounts and had discerned more money spent on drink than on missionary giving! sof 61 September 2003 Well, heady days...but I give you all this, darling readers, to remind you of the context of the current showdown between this culture, nurtured as it was in an elitist educational environment where being gay was about as extraordinary as having red hair, and the puritan ethos of conservative evangelical suburban England, which has come to dominate the ecclesiastical scene in the past decade.
There were different cultures then as well, of course: there was Wycliffe Hall with its earnest young students carrying their black, leather-bound Bibles to class, and the packed St Ebbe’s church advertising dynamic preachers of the Word such as Michael Green, alongside the Pusey House Anglo-Catholics who were described so tellingly by another of our religious heroes, Evelyn Waugh, as ‘sodomites with funny accents’. But in those days the two worlds co-existed without having to Canon Gene Robinson recognise the complexities of the many shades of grey...and this goes as much for our understanding of our sexuality as of our race...none of us are ‘one or the other’, and we know this now.
For this reason the Church of England was bound to face a tremendous problem as soon as Carey let go of his iron grip on his bishops. Small wonder that, in this current debate, nine bishops would sign one letter and seven another, thereby providing contradictory advice to Carey’s hapless and beleaguered successor. The problem is tremendous because, despite Rowan Williams’ understandable desire for unity within the Anglican Communion, it is already a lost cause, if not an impossible friendship. There never can be any compromise between a world that is fixed by the scriptures and understandings of first-century Israel and the much more developed and ‘Jeffrey John was sacrificed on the altar of the "Unity of the Church. . .”” ‘Unity is a minor and secondary virtue in the effective witness of the church. It is not a primary virtue. Truth is, and truth must trump unity every time. To listen to those who traffic in ignorance and prejudice claim that the unity of the Church inhibits them from having to face sophisticated plural world we inhabit today.
However hard the idea is to take, the Bible does not accept homosexuality at all, because it understands only a world in which the given order is either their ignorance or their prejudice is appalling.
Bp John S Spong, ‘Tragedy in the Church of England Reveals The Incompetence of Its Hierarchy’ and ‘The Unity of the Church - A Pious Cliché to Enforce Conformity’, A New Christianity for a New World, (http://secure.agoramedia.com/index_spong.asp) 2003 heterosexual and any deviation from that must be both rebellious and sinful. Much as we liberals in the Sea of Faith proclaim how ‘indignant’ we are at the bullying and denying techniques of the current Anglican hierarchy with meet up...I doubt whether Rowan Williams as a student ever attended either of these packed religious institutions. I only went to Wycliffe Hall because Keble College arranged my Greek lessons there, and the Christian Union had little further to do with me within the College once they found out I was a ‘theolog’ with the notorious Dennis Nineham as my Warden and Tutor!
Today, however, the scenario has changed remarkably. Because of shrinking numbers, there has been an increasing pressure since George Carey’s time to present the Church of England as a ‘united front’, attempting to bury or side-step controversial issues so that it might appear to be an organisation ‘singing from the same hymn-book’ and therefore an attractive society in which to stay and feel the mutual support of one’s fellow believers, of whatever theological background.
The problem with this marketing device was that it is an ill-fitting cap on the sort of free discussion of issues and free expression of sexualities that the people of England (as opposed to the official Church) have now come not only to accept, but also to appreciate: pluralism and diversity are no longer bad things to be kept out of our society at any cost. They are increasingly seen as part of the rich fabric of twenty-first century British life that we wish to cultivate and celebrate as citizens of a global culture in which we all have both rights and responsibilities. And among these changes society has become more accepting — we don’t divide any longer simply into black and white but we now sof 61 September 2003 regard to Jeffrey John’s case, I think we fool ourselves if we imagine that by stamping our feet we or any other liberal bodies will provoke a change of mind on this issue. Christian orthodoxy has associated sexuality with reproduction for so much of its history that it now equates ‘family values’ with the protection of the ideal of heterosexual marriage and 2.4 children. We cannot really expect such an institution to leave the ninety-nine heterosexuals in search of the one lost gay: that is no appropriate marketing strategy for an institution that needs above all to attend to its membership and raise its revenues.
Integrity, I fear, will have no clout in such times: watch this space and tell me I’m wrong. I hope I am, but I fear it will increasingly be the case that it is not orthodox but liberal Anglicans who will now have to consider very seriously their position with regard to this changed and fearful institution.
David A. Hart is currently an Anglican priest and serves on the Steering Committee of the SoF Network. His book Linking up: Christianity and Sexuality (Arthur James 1997) was bought up and pulped by a leading UK evangelical bookstore chain but is still available in some public libraries. mi The Time for Change The Road to Reform and the Path of Prejudice Canada May 28th, 2003: After the Diocese of New Westminster Vancouver, had requested that its bishop England May 20th, 2003: The Bishop of Oxford announced the nomination of The Reverend Canon Dr Jeffrey John as the Area Bishop of Reading. authorise clergy La pertenna 2 July 6th, 2003: After a 6 hour meeting rite of blessing of committed at Lambeth Palace, Canon Jeffrey John same Sex UNIONS IN 1998, announced that he intended to seek 2001 and 2002, finally, In the permission of the Crown to 2003, the diocesan bishop, withdraw his acceptance of the The Bigot Reverend Michael nomination to Reading, writing to the Ingharn, authorized @ Mts GF Diocesan Bishop of Oxford that this blessing of homosexual was ‘in view of the damage my a 7 ha 4 some consecration might cause to the unity esignated churches. ofthe Church, Conservatives Worldwide June 2003: The Archbishop of Nigeria, the leader of the world's biggest Anglican community, threatened to break ties with any part of the Anglican Church that elects a gay bishop - including the Church of England. This stance was later supported by the Archbishop of the West Indies and the Archbishop of Sydney.