The Great Debate UK

Pragmatism beats idealism in fight for women bishops

- Reverend Dr. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes is Chaplain and Solway Fellow of University College, Durham. The opinions expressed are her own. -

The Church of England’s governing body, General Synod, has over the past few days given the green light to women bishops once again.

Now each diocese in the Church of England will discuss the proposed legislation, and a final vote is expected to take place in two years time. If all goes to plan, the first woman bishop in the Church of England could be consecrated in early 2014.

There is no shortage of good candidates. The Church of England now has four female Deans of cathedrals, 17 female Archdeacons, and many other senior women such as Canons and staff in theological colleges, all as able and as gifted as the men who get made bishops.

I can’t wait to attend the consecration of the first woman bishop. It will be a great joy to see the Church visibly valuing women and men equally, as Jesus did.

The process by which the Church of England changes it rules can be frustratingly slow, but it does have the advantage that it listens to everyone and tries very hard indeed to accommodate everyone.

Proposed legislation on women bishops falls short

- Reverend Dr. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes is Chaplain and Solway Fellow of University College, Durham. The opinions expressed are her own. -

A controversial decision by a committee drawing up legislation to allow women bishops has been met with criticism from women who are seeking equal representation at the highest levels in the Church of England.

Women have been ordained as priests in the Church of England since 1994, but cannot currently become bishops.

Since 2006, the Church of England has been preparing draft legislation to remove the legal obstacles to women bishops. In 2008, the General Synod voted to reject a range of options which set up separate structures within the church for those who could not accept women’s ordination, and instead asked the  Revision Committee to draw up simple legislation without discrimination, alongside a separate code of practice to “protect” those who objected to women’s ministry.

But last Thursday, the Revision Committee issued a statement saying that they had decided to reject this route. Instead, they propose to prepare legislation which would  enforce the transfer of powers from the diocesan bishop to a special anti-woman bishop, if the diocesan bishop were either a woman, or a man who agreed with the ordination of women.

I am deeply concerned about this decision. In the first place, the remit of the revision committee based on the synod debates last year was to prepare simple legislation with a code of practice, and I fail to see any justification for the revision committee taking it upon themselves to reject the will of synod in this way. I, along with many of my colleagues on Synod, feel betrayed by this disregard for the hard work and serious thought which was put in by us all in that debate.

Persistently over history God is seen as male

- Reverend Dr. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes is Chaplain and Solway Fellow of University College, Durham. As a historian, she has published work on late medieval monastic history and the medieval economic history of the North East of England, notably “Monks and Markets” (Oxford University Press, 2005). Her current research interests are the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, and women’s issues in the contemporary church. She is a member of the General Synod of the Church of England, and a committee member for the group Women and the Church.

International Women’s Day on March 8, is an important opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that women are still taken less seriously than men all around the world. Even in supposedly equal cultures such as my own in the UK women continue, for example, to be paid less than men for the same work, and to suffer pregnancy-related discrimination in employment. Women are disproportionately under-represented in government and on the boards of large corporations. Women’s sport is generally less well funded and less popular than men’s, whilst women’s contribution to art and literature has a tendency to be marginalised – as “chick lit,” for example.

Of course, viewing women as of lesser value than men has a long history. We cannot expect such deeply held cultural stereotypes to be overturned instantly. But it does worry me that some people in our culture seem to believe that we have eradicated sexism from our society, and that further progress is therefore at best unnecessary, at worst signs of a suspicious “feminist agenda” aiming not for equality, but for superiority for women.

Just because we (thankfully) have laws in place for gender equality and against discrimination, does not mean that the fight for equality is over. Underlying attitudes and assumptions about men and women are much harder to change. The sexism that we are barely aware of, or accept as being “just the way things are”, is an extremely powerful disincentive to change.

It is a sad fact that for many people, the male is still seen as the norm for humanity, and the female as deviant from the norm. Even where this is not intended as a value judgement, it remains an insidious underlying assumption of a great deal of day to day activity and discourse. For example, medical trials are often based on men alone except for specific “female complaints.”

In the church, the debate over women’s ordination provides a good example of how the male is still seen as normative. In Christian theology, it is axiomatic that God is neither male nor female. Yet persistently over history God has been normalised as male, and men have therefore been seen as closer to God than women.

In arguments against women’s ordination as priests or bishops in the Church of England today, claims are still made that only men can represent Christ. Yet Christ in Christian theology is the ultimate representative human being, not the ultimate representative man.