Gay bishops are a possibility for Anglicans, but much more study and discussion needs to take place first, says leading theologian the Rev Professor Oliver O’Donovan.In a Fulcrum lecture at St Mary’s, Islington, last Monday, The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice, the Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh called for the Church to focus on reading scripture considerately before deciding on the implications of its authority.
“Obeying the Bible on sexuality is a matter of reading the text and thinking about,” said Prof O’Donovan. “Scripture does not provide us with the concrete act itself. Devising that act is what practical thinking is all about, and doing it faithfully is what obedience is all about.”
Prof O’Donovan admitted that such concrete actions by their nature relate to a temporal reality, and therefore are subject to change with it. He said no one commentary could claim to have a definitive interpretation of scripture and insisted “what we need is a catholic understanding, which is being a Church.” The theologian dismissed the idea that the Bible was a changing entity with its meaning dependent on the community reading it. This apparently set him against the liberal wing of the Anglican Communion who emphasise the authority of the Spirit over Scripture.
However, he conceded that it was possible to envisage a future scenario where it would be possible for gay bishops to be consecrated.
He said: “I can write that novel, I can imagine a possible future where gay bishops could be consecrated, just as I could imagine a situation where I might shoot someone, if they were in a car wreck, about to die in horrible pain. But there is so much discussion about what that would mean which needs to be undertaken first.”
A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy, is the Professor’s latest book, published by SCM Press to high praise.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said: “Oliver O’Donovan’s reflections on the current troubles of the Anglican Church are quite simply of unique significance. He consistently takes us to the questions others are not asking and refuses the ready-made questions and answers that paralyse our thinking about sexuality debates.”
Professor John Milbank of the University of Nottingham said: “O’Donovan has here achieved nothing less than an indication of just how Anglicanism can in the future reconstruct itself through a recovery of a Hooker-like sense of Episcopalian catholicity, and the Patristic integration of Platonic wisdom with biblical revelation, on the part of more discerning evangelicals like himself.”
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