MARTIN DAVIE is a considerable scholar and this is a substantial book. Its 842 pages contain much to commend it, and, in addition, its price is surprisingly low.
It is good that an Evangelical Anglican takes episcope so seriously and takes the trouble, as the author does here, to articulate its importance from New Testament times through the Early Church and the Reformation period up to the present day. He engages with a rich variety of sources, and this book would be a good resource for anyone wanting to understand the origin, development, and significance of episcopacy in the Anglican tradition.
It is his coverage of the present day which, for me, is problematic. The book includes an appendix describing the process for permitting women to become bishops in the Church of England. He describes it as having “left the Church of England in a deeply unsatisfactory situation” since “the Church of England as a whole, and the House of Bishops, as guardians of its doctrine, have responsibility to be as theologically certain as they can be that the decisions made by the Church of England are the right ones. In the case of the process for introducing women bishops, this responsibility was not discharged.” That is a contentious point, to put it mildly.
The author takes the term “good enough bishop” from Paul Avis’s book Becoming a Bishop (Bloomsbury, 2015), in which the latter writes that “a good enough bishop is a precious gift to God’s Church”. Davie goes on to explain what this might mean in relation to the history that he has expounded so well.
It all makes for good and encouraging reading until one realises that the culmination of this impressive work of theology is polemic against those who are in favour of changing the Church’s teaching on same-sex relations. He is very clear: “To engage in same-sex activity is sinful because it involves translating resentment against the way we have been made by God into a form of activity which actively goes against the way God has made us to be. . . This may not be what people consciously think they are doing, but it is what they are doing in practice.”
The author’s last word is to pray that “the bishops as a whole will act as the shepherds they are call [sic] to be by protecting those in the Church of England from the influence of the modern Western ideology of self-determination and the ungodly views of sexual identity and sexual behaviour that flow from it.” Those of us who think otherwise are lumped with — among others — Nestorius, Apollinarius, and Peter Ball as “not good-enough bishops”. Any other approach is branded heretical.
This seems to be all that this study was leading to, all that the author has to say about the future of episcopacy. It is a contentious and, to me, very disappointing conclusion to an excellent work of scholarship. I was hoping for a greater and more inspiriting vision for the future.
Dr John Inge is the Bishop of Worcester.
Bishops Past, Present and Future
Martin Davie
Gilead Books £19.95
(978-1-8381828-3-0)
Church Times Bookshop £17.95