An obsession with bishops is a defining characteristic of Anglicanism, both ancient and modern. Church of England types may be wedded to traditional patriarchy or encouraged by women's rights.They can be Anglo-Catholic, evangelical or liberal, touched with Pentecostalism and keen on charismatic gifts, ensconced in the rural deanery, immersed in the urban mission, or droning on in the Lords.
But what unites them all is a preoccupation with the bishop, that ecclesiastical bossy-boots figure who fingers the cross that bounces up and down the heaving and preachy chest.
Even dozy congregations can liven up a bit when told that "the bishop is coming".
New Testament religion doesn't get much of a look in so far as the modern CofE is concerned – which suits the episcopalian just fine, since bishops only arrived on the scene some two centuries after Christ's birth.
The eastern Mediterranean milieu of the first century AD does seem an awfully long time ago, and explaining why God might be complicit in killing his son has always been a challenge.
But if Christ seems remote, at least we still have the bishop. His Greek may not be up to much any more but there's one word that he really adores: episkope – the power to oversee.
Big bishop is looking after you.
Many other churches, of course, have bishops – especially the "historic" ones that pretend to be possessed of supernaturally guided lines of direct communication with the apostles. Any one ordained into these organisations has to subscribe to the ridiculous belief that spiritual authority can be directly transmitted by the "laying of hands".
Peter and the apostles had this power because they were Christ's intimates. Bishops have it now because they were ordained by earlier bishops.
Follow right on to the end of the line and you will be in touch with the first century.
This "apostolic succession" is the Ouija board theory of Christian communication – "Peter – are you there?" – and an absurd basis for any authority.
It is nonetheless the only reason why bishops should exist in either gender, and the quarrel about female bishops ignores the fact that it's the office itself that stinks.
Serious-minded people who want to get on ecclesiastically presumably cross fingers behind backs when kneeling before a bishop while waiting for a dollop of heaven to drop down.
Greek and Russian Orthodox, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, German Lutherans, American Methodists, and Roman Catholics: all join the Anglicans in liking bishops. And the office's antiquity can seem persuasive.
Christianity may seem difficult and odd, but its churches have been around for ages, and the ubiquity of the bishop is something to hang on to in challenging times. There's still, though, an obsessive quality about the Anglican attachment to episcopacy.
An English love of hierarchy has much to do with it, and even the most egalitarian-minded cleric can be changed in speech and manner once "translated" to his see.
The contemporary Anglican surrender to management methodology has also added a new level of nausea to the traditional odium theologicum. It's hardly surprising that parish clergy are starting to join Unite in order to defend themselves against bishops who venerate consultants McKinsey rather than the saints.
But the real basis to the Anglican craze for episcopacy lies in a neurosis that is now almost five centuries old.
The Reformation cut the English church away from Rome, and in doing so it destroyed any credibility so far as the apostolic succession was concerned.
Despite the removal, sometimes by murder, of England's Catholic bishops, it was still important to pretend that it could be ecclesiastical business as usual.
The Virgin Mary had disappeared, but the Tudor monarchs were prayed for in the Prayer Book and they could replace the Queen of Heaven.
Even today, the Anglican hierarchy remains one of the last places of refuge for those who take the royal family at all seriously.
Bishops really came into their own from the 16th century onwards in England because they were supposed to show that the CofE, though it had no pope, was still respectably antique – and therefore worthy of obedience – despite the loss of that Roman link.
Fussiness about episcopacy is in fact Anglicanism's implicit acknowledgment that it does not actually have the kind of historic authority it would like to have.
Greater honesty about itself should lead the Church of England to get rid of bishops altogether and rejoice in the freedom that comes with being a sect.
But that would involve the abandonment not just of pretension but also of a career structure that means too much to too many Anglican minds.
SIC: TGUK