the way we live now ‘T


here is a fairly widespread assumption in the prevailing culture of Britain that people


of faith rely on dogma and bigotry and that no one with a brain can believe in God. I am exaggerating, of course, but you know what I mean.’ So wrote Jane Williams, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a theologian in her own right, in the Church Times. She described atitudes to people of faith in contemporary Britain as ‘lazy’ and ‘scornful’. Meanwhile the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has launched a ‘Not Ashamed’ campaign urging Christians to stand up for their rights. All this is admirable, if a litle


belated; but it comes strangely from the lips of two enthusiastic proponents of the ordination of women. Have they not noticed, one is obliged to ask, that laziness and scorn are the hallmarks of those within the Church who have relentlessly sought to marginalize those who in conscience disagree with them? Accusations of bigotry, misogyny


and worse have been stock in trade. If liberal ‘mainstream’ Anglicans are feeling the pinch now, they are merely experiencing for themselves the treatment which they have meted out to others. Speaking for myself I can bear with approaching


something equanimity


the not infrequent insinuations that opposition to women’s ordination is akin to a sort of personality disorder. It is the wholly unfounded intellectual arrogance of the women’s ordination lobby which gives me grief. How in the world can they effortlessly assume the intellectual high ground, when their arguments are so weak and so fraudulent? How did it come about, for example,


that the General Synod of the Church of England (a body not noted for either its scholarship or its intellectual acumen) could opine that ‘there are no fundamental objections’


to the ordination of women – when the best


minds of the two greatest churches in Christendom assert that there are? One has only for a moment to


consider a selection of the ‘arguments’ generally advanced to support the innovation to see how threadbare is the carpet on which the proponents stand. Some are persuaded by the role of


Mary of Magdala in the scriptures. Mary


is claimed to be ‘apostola


Apostolorum’, the apostle to the Apostles. But on what grounds? In


Mark’s Gosel she is mentioned among others, as visiting the tomb, finding it empty and receiving a message from a young man in white. But she does not pass on the message. Like the other women she is silent and afraid. In Mathew’s


account she also


visits the tomb accompanied. Tere the ‘angel of the Lord’


similarly


admonishes them. Tey see the Risen Lord and ‘clasp his feet’. Tey go off, as bidden, to inform the disciples; but this commission is strictly limited. True, they are sent to the disciples; but it is to the disciples (‘the eleven’), and not the women, that the Great Commission is given. In Luke’s account the women see


two men in shining garments who tell them that the Lord is risen, as he and the scriptures said he would. Tey inform the incredulous disciples. But it is Clopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road who first see the Lord (or Peter [24.34] if his apparition preceded theirs). In John’s Gosel the first witness


to the resurrection is the Beloved Disciple, who ‘saw and believed’. Te primacy of the Magdalen, in


short, is a sentimental fiction for which there is, at best, scant evidence on which to base a revolution in the immemorial pracice of the Church. Others are persuaded by ‘evidence’ of


women priests in the earliest Christian communities. One such enthusiast was the veteran Presbyterian theologian Tom Torrance, who asserted that a fresco in a Roman catacomb represents


How can proponents of women’s ordination attempt to take the intellectual high ground when their arguments are so weak? asks Geoffrey Kirk


Aquila celebrating the Eucharist with his wife Priscilla and others, atended by deacons. None of this is


even vaguely


plausible. All disinterested authorities date the painting to the end of the second century; there is no evidence of the connection with Priscilla until the twelſth century; the present state of the fresco makes it impossible to determine the sex of the participants. Why a scholar with an international reputation should risk it on erroneous assertions about a painting he had clearly never seen is a question to be asked. Ten there are assertions of


the the ‘bigotry’


ill-founded and


‘misogyny’ of the Christian past. Take, for example, the oſt-repeated myth about the Council of Macon (585 AD). Tere, as a female archdeacon told me only recently, it was decided that women have no souls. But not so. As


Professor Nolan (of the


University of Dublin) has shown, the acts of the council contain neither ‘mulier’ nor ‘anima’. Such a discussion quite simply never took place; and the book which asserted that it had was placed on the index of prohibited books by Pope Innocent X (published, Lyons, 1647; prohibited, Rome, 1651). So much for the claim that the Church continued to uphold the ‘opinion’! Te archdeacon in question –


though she has no reputation such as Torrance’s to defend – could nevertheless have done a Google search and ascertained the facts of the mater for herself. Te truth of all this is only too


apparent. Te proponents of women’s ordination have a priori reasons for their enthusiasm. Tose reasons prove to be impervious to historical or rational refutation. ‘Lazy’ ‘scornful’


and is, I would say, a good


working description. Jane Williams and George Carey should be careful that


they do not slip into the bad


habits that they so accurately ascribe to others. ND


April 2011 ■ newdirections ■ 19


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