Explanatory Note:

Transferred Episcopal Arrangements (henceforward, TEA) constitutes the preferred approach to possible legislation for the ordination of women to the Episcopate in the Report of the House of Bishops’ Women Bishops Group chaired by the Bishop of Guildford, GS 1605 (henceforward ‘Guildford’.)

1.      The nature of the problem

1.1   We take it that the aim of the TEA proposals is to provide the necessary space for those opposed to the ordination of women to the Episcopate to thrive in the Church of England;  and that ‘Guildford’ is seeking to uphold the assurances given to opponents in the House of Bishops document ‘Bonds of Peace’ and in the Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 that those who continue to uphold the traditional doctrine and practice of the Church of England about Holy Orders (received from the tradition and preserved through the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) continue to occupy an honoured place within it.

1.2   The Legal Working Group of Forward in Faith has already pointed out many anomalies and inconsistencies in the practical outworking of the TEA proposals. At the same time they highlighted unresolved and unanswered questions. In this paper, we are concerned to emphasise those key theological and ecclesiological principles which, we believe, make TEA an inadequate solution to the new problems which will arise as a result of the consecration of female bishops.

In particular we draw attention to the following:

i              TEA locates the source, or origin, of Episcopal authority in the bishop of the diocese, even when that bishop is female.

ii             TEA introduces a novel notion of  Episcopal jurisdiction. By its provision bishops in a state of fractured, or impaired, communion are nevertheless required to share jurisdiction;

iii            TEA thus fails to provide for an authentic college of bishops, in full and unimpaired communion one with another, which, in its turn, can alone guarantee authentic communion among presbyters and lay people;

iv            TEA separates pastoral and sacramental care from the fullness of legal jurisdiction. Thus it fatally weakens the sense of the bishop as paterfamilias (‘Father in God’) which is emphasised in the earliest strands of the tradition and which derives from the Scriptures themselves.

v             TEA misunderstands the role of the Archbishop as focus of unity for the college of bishops of his Province, as expressed in his role as their principal consecrator.

1.3   These problems, we believe, derive from a basic misunderstanding. The TEA proposals are couched in terms of protection: they seek to ensure that the ministry of a male bishop will always be available to those who require it. But they treat that male bishop as though he existed in virtual isolation from the college of bishops of which he is a part. To do so, we believe, is to come dangerously close to endorsing that doctrine of ‘taint’, of which opponents of women priests and bishops have routinely (though erroneously) been accused.

1.4   As the Archbishop of Canterbury has rightly observed, opposition to the ordination of women as priests and bishops is for us a matter of conscience grounded in obedience to scripture and the tradition. Our difficulty is not that female bishops are women; but that we doubt they are bishops in the historic episcopate. The question, in consequence, is not ‘how can I be shielded from the ministry of ordained women?’, but rather ‘where can I find that unimpaired collegiality of bishops, priests,  deacons and faithful laity to which, as a Catholic Christian, I seek to belong?’  Understood in these terms, the matter of provision for traditionalists becomes not one of erecting fences, but of enabling an authentic ecclesial community to flourish in which clergy and people can live out their calling, preach the Gospel and witness to Christ. This need to be in authentic ecclesial relationship is not, for us, a trivial or merely ‘churchy’ matter. Ecclesial relationships derive their authenticity from the ‘Being-in-Communion’ of the Blessed Trinity itself, from the interpenetration of the divine with the human which is effected through the incarnation, resurrection and return to glory of the Son of the Father.  To fracture those ecclesial relationships is thus to impair the very relationship between the individual and God.

2.      Who is my bishop?

2.1   This simple question goes to the heart of the TEA proposals. As we argued extensively in Consecrated Women? [see especially Part One sections 7 & 8, Part Three sections 1-4], the authentic exercise of the Episcopal office is personal. The question, then, will always have a one word answer: a Christian name. That the office is personal does not mean, however, that it is exercised in splendid isolation. The new Common Worship ordinal rightly speaks of the duty of bishops “to share with their fellow presbyters the oversight of the Church.” This is language about the collegiality of bishops and presbyters. It is not an invitation to create a ‘team’ of bishops, all related to the one presbyteral college. Nor is it a justification of such an arrangement. Suffragan bishops act on behalf of the diocesan with whom they serve, not in addition to him. Under present arrangements, the Provincial Episcopal Visitors are suffragans of the Archbishop, exercising, by extension, his jurisdiction (and, arguably, the jurisdiction of the diocesans in whose Dioceses they have been appointed Assistant Bishops). This is possible, of course, precisely because the Archbishops, and all the bishops, can presently be truly accounted as such by all.

2.2   TEA changes all this. It allows for no straightforward answer to the question, “Who is my bishop?” Under TEA, even though much (precisely how much remains unclear) of the jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop passes, eventually, to the PRB, the diocesan remains its source and origin. The PRB is not, therefore, in possession of ordinary jurisdiction; he holds it by virtue of a prior act of self-surrender by the diocesan. TEA, at least in part, involves opponents of women bishops in a kind of double-think. They are encouraged to consider themselves adequately distanced from women bishops and those who act collegially with them, on the one hand; but obliged to accept that the authority of their PRB derives from the jurisdiction of the diocesan on the other.

2.3   In the case of presbyters the question “Who is my bishop?” touches directly on the exercise of their priestly office. Ordination is not simply a matter of the laying on of hands by a bishop on an individual; it is about reception into a presbyterium, of which the laying on of hands by all other priests present is a lively sign. So there is another question: which presbyterium is the newly-ordained priest joining? There is, in our view, enough ambiguity in TEA for a female bishop to assert that all priests in her (geographical) diocese belong to her priestly ‘college.’ The proposals are allowing on the one hand what on the other they expressly seek to avoid: for no woman bishop or male bishop acting collegially with her can be the focus of unity of a presbyterium which includes those who cannot in conscience accept that she is a bishop.

2.4   Nor is the problem simply one for the clergy. Communion for lay people is, in a similar way, in and through the bishop. Each member of the laity is in communion with his, or her, own bishop; those bishops are in communion with one another; and so the communion of the whole people of God is sustained. Where there is confusion about the Episcopal college, where it is fractured and divided, there is real damage done to the fullness of communion mutually enjoyed among the whole people of God.

3.      What kind of College?

3.1   “Bishops exercise individually a ministry which is shared by them as a body; collegiality is implicit in the nature of the ministry of oversight.” (Bishops in Communion: HOB Occasional Paper GS Misc 580 p. 28).  As we have said, the Episcopal office is personal: to separate out separate functions and distribute them to discrete persons is to undermine its very nature and integrity. At the same time the Episcopal office is collegial. Just as Christ’s commission in the New Testament is to his apostles as a body (as BiC notes well), so bishops exercise their ministry in solidarity one with another, a solidarity which is made visible through the recognition of one another’s sacramental acts and the legitimacy of one another’s presbyteral colleges. (These two things together might be said to constitute what we mean by bishops being ‘in communion.’)

3.2   In this fundamental understanding, Anglicans can agree with much Roman Catholic ecclesiology, as exemplified by, for example, these words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (as he then was) in Called to Communion:

 
The bishops are successors of the apostles in general; they do not succeed a certain apostle but are members of the college that takes the role of the apostolic college, and this fact makes each single one of them a successor of the apostles. (p.97)

3.3   There cannot be true collegiality where some cannot accept the orders of others. Yet the TEA  proposals for shared jurisdiction clearly anticipate that all bishops will somehow remain members together of one college, even though the marks of collegiality – more fundamentally still, the means by which collegiality is made a spiritual reality and not just an administrative arrangement – are absent. In other words, there will be the appearance of collegiality without that mutual recognition of sacramental actions which gives it a true inner life. Can such a radically dysfunctional Episcopal college allow Christian life to flourish? Can it allow bishops to be truly, as the Common Worship Ordinal directs, ‘signs of the Universal Church’? Surely such a functional and administrative view of episcopacy undermines the sacramental assurance which bishops exist to express and uphold?

3.4   Nor is this a question of the mutual recognition of sacraments alone. Admission to the apostolic college - membership of that college by virtue of Episcopal ordination - carries with it the responsibility and requirement of teaching the apostolic faith. This is no carte blanche to institute a new teaching, to inaugurate a new ‘tradition’. The charism given is one of teaching to a new generation what the apostles taught of old. If members of the same college are holding (and therefore presumably teaching) radically opposing doctrines about something as fundamental as the nature of the Episcopate itself, then we must ask: in what sense is this a college – and in what sense, therefore, is the church which this college serves, truly a Church? We agree with the Response by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales to the Rochester Report, [GS Misc 807]:

“…we do not understand how bishops can exercise their ministry in solidum when it is being suggested that some bishops in the Church of England…may not be able to recognise and accept the ministry of some of their fellow bishops. Such a situation cannot safeguard the unity of the Church.”

3.5  ‘Guildford’ makes much of the fact that even after the ordination of female bishops, all bishops in the Church of England will have a common intention, whether consecrating women or men, to do so to the ‘historic episcopate,’ to do just as the Church has always intended to do. We fail to see how this can be so. The Church of England cannot claim to be intending to ordain to the ‘historic episcopate’ those who have been historically excluded from it, and whom the great Churches of East and West continue to exclude from it. The response of the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales to the Rochester Report generously agrees that the bishops of the Church of England are, in some sense, part of the worldwide episcopate of the Church Catholic, even though Communion is fractured. It would be to draw entirely the wrong conclusion from that generosity, to see in it an opening of the possibility of a still further weakening of the Church of England’s ability to claim a share in that worldwide college.

3.6   As we have been at pains to show, a great deal is at stake as the Church of England considers embarking on a scheme which will necessarily involve the impairment and fracture of the college of bishops, and an end to the mutual recognition of Episcopal orders. Nor are we alone in viewing such a development with the utmost seriousness. We agree with Dr Martin Davie, Theological Secretary of the Council for Christian Unity, in his paper ‘Some comments on Ecumenical Responses to “Women Bishops in the Church of England?”’ when he writes:

‘This issue of the potential fracturing of the Episcopal college and of Episcopal communion is one of the most important issues surrounding the proposal to introduce women bishops and requires serious discussion before any decision to introduce women bishops is made.’

We do not believe that the Church of England – in its parishes, deaneries and dioceses, let alone its General Synod – has begun to undertake that serious discussion for which Dr Davie rightly calls.

4.      The role of the Archbishop

4.1   ‘Guildford’ displays a degree of hesitancy in considering the role of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and suggests that consideration of the archiepiscopal role should not ‘assume disproportionate importance at this stage.’ Yet it could, in the normal course of events, be no more than 9 years until there is a Vacancy in the See of Canterbury: too short a period, we would suggest, simply to postpone the decision. More fundamentally, it seems to us wrong, when considering so momentous a decision as the ordination of women as bishops, not to ensure that every consequence of such a decision has been thoroughly considered. To do otherwise is to proceed by what one Diocesan bishop has termed ‘theology by trundle’ – conceivably, the method which has brought the Church of England to the edge of the present crisis.

4.2   TEA envisages the ministry of the Archbishop as the key locus of unity within the (further divided) Church of England. In effect, TEA places all parishes which request the ministry of the PRB into a state of permanent ‘metropolitical visitation.’ However, once again we believe that, by proceeding according to methodology of ‘protection’ and ‘distancing,’ rather than one of authentic Christian community, TEA fails to grapple with the real issues.

4.3   We believe that it is inevitable, once the Church of England moves to ordain women as bishops, that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York as ‘presidents’ of the Episcopal colleges in their respective Provinces, will continue to fulfil their distinctive role as the focus of unity for the bishops of the province – both for women bishops and male colleagues who are in unimpaired communion with them. (As Dr Colin Podmore has noted in his recent collection of essays, Aspects of Anglican Identity,  “…in the Church of England diocesan bishops are not independent operators but members of the college of bishops of a province and a national church, whose canons bind them to corporate decisions in matters of communion.” (p. 85)) And yet, as we have seen, male bishops who cannot in conscience accept women as bishops would be unable to function collegially with an Archbishop who remained the head of such a college. The archbishops, it seems, are the least and not the most suitable candidates in their colleges of bishops to exercise the role which ‘Guildford’ assigns to them.

4.4   The anomalies become clearer when the position of petitioning parishes in the dioceses of York and Canterbury are considered. In such cases the diocesan from whom jurisdiction was transferred and the Archbishop to whom it was transferred would, of course, be one and the same person. The PRB to whom aspects of jurisdiction had been delegated would be required to stand in one relationship to that person as diocesan (from whose ministry the parish had sought to be distanced); and quite another as the metropolitical authority (on whom the alternative provision which the PRB himself was exercising was grounded)!

4.5   It might be thought that these anomalies could be mitigated somewhat by one or both archbishops undertaking to refrain from ordaining women to the episcopate. But it does not seem so. Even if such a sleight-of-hand proved acceptable to those opposed to women’s ordination (which we doubt), there would remain the problem of the archbishop’s role as head of his Episcopal college. To be acceptable to opponents, he would also need to distance himself from full communion and reciprocity with the women members of the college and those who acted collegially with them. And yet in what sense could an archbishop who was not in unimpaired communion with all the bishops of his province be said to be its Primate? Would he not thereby become, de facto, the presiding bishop of those opposed?

4.6   There might, in our view, be a case for the Archbishop of Canterbury refraining from the ordination of women to the episcopate to facilitate relationships between provinces of the world-wide communion with differing views (as well as remaining a focus of unity for English Anglicans of variant opinions). But in order to do so he would surely need to relinquish his connection with the diocese of Canterbury and to occupy a post not dissimilar to that of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The question of whether a bishop without a diocese is in any real sense a bishop, would, of course, be another consideration.

4.7   In conclusion, we hold that TEA not merely misunderstands the nature of the office of Archbishop, but actually renders the exercise of that office potentially unacceptable to one, or both, ‘integrities’ within the Church of England. The problems which become apparent in the approach to the office of Archbishop evidenced in TEA are all of a piece with the ‘bottom up’ approach to the ordination of women which the Church of England has employed from the outset. Had we begun with the question, “Should women be bishops?” (or even Archbishops), these problems would not now be presenting in this way.

5.      Authority, jurisdiction and pastoral care

5.1   In the new Common Worship Ordinal, we are reminded at several points in the rite for the Ordination of a Bishop, that bishops are called after the pattern of the Good Shepherd. They are ‘to be merciful but with firmness; to minister discipline, but with compassion.’ They are ‘to feed and to govern.’ In the one person of the bishop, justice and mercy, Law and Gospel, are to be held together.

5.2   We endeavoured to show, in Consecrated Women?, how such putative schemes as ‘team episcopate,’ the admission of a female suffragan to assist a male diocesan, or conversely, the preservation of one male suffragan in a ‘mixed’ Episcopal team, were fundamentally destructive of the unity of the key characteristics of the bishop’s office.

5.3   We believe that, while ‘Guildford’ goes some way to meeting this problem (TEA delegates ‘pastoral care, sacramental and disciplinary functions’ to the PRB) it fails to get to the root of it. Even a female diocesan remains the source and origin of jurisdiction under TEA, and a measure of jurisdiction is ‘returned’ to the Diocesan by the Archbishop. We cannot help reflecting that this is an essentially worldly view and exercise of jurisdiction. The proper role of the bishop - to use a word of which we made much use in Consecrated Women? - is that of the paterfamilias, whose symbols of authority include among them, paradoxically, the bowl and towel. Jurisdiction which is exercised over the unwilling is not jurisdiction as we understand it in any Gospel sense..

6.      Conclusion

6.1   We continue to believe that it is only by means of an independent Episcopal jurisdiction (of which Provincial arrangements provide one suitable, and simple, model) that an authentic college of bishops, in full collegiality and communion, can be assured. Only such a college, with such an integrity, will answer, for priests, deacons and laity, the question ‘Who is my bishop?’ Only such a college will give the sacramental assurance for which they seek. Only such a college will overcome the problems of the role of the archbishops inherent in TEA. Only such a college will conserve the essential unity between the juridical and pastoral offices of the bishop

6.2   ‘Guildford’ sees in such arrangements the threat of schism. We cannot see that what the Church of England itself lawfully establishes (for the sake of the peace of the Church), can be called schism. Instead, like the present arrangements (which were implemented, be it remembered, precisely to facilitate the ordination of women to the priesthood), it would create ‘bonds of peace’. Extension of those bonds is now patently necessary; but the principle of sustaining the greatest possible degree of communion remains the same. As the former Archbishop of York, Lord Hope, publicly noted towards the end of his archiepiscopal ministry: the earlier provisions cannot not bear the weight which the admission of women to the episcopate will place upon them – as his predecessor too had foreseen:

Liz Carney: So while the two integrities exist, is there any possibility that a woman will be consecrated bishop?

John Habgood: I think that I’m probably out of line here and I’m not in any case in any position to do anything about it, but I would have argued against it.

(from an interview on File on Four, BBC Radio 4, 7 October 1997)         

6.3   The fear is sometimes expressed that a new Province might at a future time declare itself ‘out of communion’ with the Provinces of Canterbury and York. What might happen in the future is known to the Father alone. Our task – in all human frailty – is to respond to the present, with an eye to the future. Proposals along the lines of those suggested in Consecrated Women? introduce no divisions or ecclesiological anomalies which are not already present in the Anglican Communion or the Church of England. In other contexts Anglicans have taken pride in their ability to live with divisions and disagreements which would have been unthinkable only three or four decades ago. We believe that the language of ‘Guildford’ is often the language of fear, and the harsh language of control which springs from fear. As we have argued in this paper, as long as jurisdiction is seen as a means of control, we will never succeed in creating an environment in which Christians of differing opinions can flourish together, to the enrichment of the Church and to the glory of God.

6.4   The ‘Guildford’ proposals, we have no doubt, are a sincere attempt to meet the needs of those opposed to the ordination of women as bishops. The mistake, however, was to suppose that there are two ‘extreme’ solutions on offer (a single-clause measure and a new Province) and that there must be a via media betwixt and between. We neither think that to be the case, nor suppose that to be a sound methodology. Along with the notion that the prime task was to provide protection for a minority (rather than to develop a coherent ecclesiology which will allow both proponents and opponents to thrive) that approach has resulted in proposals which are unlikely to prove acceptable to either party. We urge that the question be re-visited, so that the theological arguments can be considered again, and in much greater depth than heretofore. Those theological and ecclesiological arguments, we believe, make an independent jurisdiction (one which retains family loyalty to the rest of the Church of England, and is committed to collaborating in mission with it) the way forward for all, so that both those who are enthusiastic for the admission of women to the episcopate, and those who remain unable to accept this as an authentic development in the life of the Catholic Church, will be offered every opportunity not only to survive, but to grow.

Jonathan Baker

XAndrew Ebbsfleet

John Hunwicke

Geoffrey Kirk

Sam Philpott

The Feast of the English Martyrs

MMVI