Bangor Cathedral inquiry needed
From the Revd Dr John Prysor-Jones and the Very Revd Professor Gordon McPhate
Madam, — We write as members of the College of Priests at St Deiniol’s Cathedral, Bangor, where we have worshipped for 13 and eight years, respectively, since retirement. We have a sacramental, preaching, and pastoral ministry, but take no part in the management of the cathedral. Between us, we have had more than 70 years of ministry in parish, cathedral, hospital, and university settings, in which we have both held senior management positions.
After the Visitation of Bangor Cathedral (News, 9 May), recommendations were published, and a process of implementation was outlined. Being told to simply “move on” is, however, insufficient for many in the cathedral community. Our impression is that several younger employed people and students have stopped worshipping with us. The reputational damage to the cathedral, the diocese, and the Church in Wales is considerable.
The published report is unsatisfactory because it was limited by narrow terms of reference, and so the Visitation team did not take evidence and make findings of fact, instead reaching conclusions based on impressions, with a disproportionate focus on the cathedral choir.
The report seems to ignore the unhappy 14-year history of staff leaving the cathedral — including successive Deans, five clergy, a Director of Music, and a verger — some of whom suffered physically and mentally, and it has been rumoured that substantial out-of-court settlements were paid. Further rumours of financial mismanagement, possibly involving illegality, raise more questions. The cathedral community has little confidence in the ability of the Chapter to lead the implementation of the recommendations, based on its past performance.
When the Sub-Dean suddenly left the cathedral early in 2024, our advice was that an Acting Dean should be appointed for a fixed period to ensure stability, continuity, direction, trust-building, and ongoing pastoral care; otherwise, chaos would ensue, which has happened. This would still be our advice, to ensure that the implementation process is complete before the appointment of a new Dean. The advertisement for the Dean’s post is, however, already on the diocesan website and in the Church Times, but combined with responsibility for a ministry area.
We urge that the Bishops of the Province should commission a formal inquiry into the diocese of Bangor and its cathedral since 2011, and that this should be led by an external person of proven ability to find the truth, with a theological and pastoral background, assisted by advisers in organisational management, canon law, civil law, and criminal law. That person would have power to see all documentation, take evidence, make findings of fact, make recommendations, and ensure publication of the final report.
The claim of confidentiality has left too many legitimate questions unanswered.
The peace that Jesus brings is deeply rooted in confronting what is wrong, in putting things right, in restoring relationships, and in releasing the oppressed. There can be no peace without justice.
JOHN PRYSOR-JONES
Bryn-y-Mor, St John’s Park
Penmaenmawr LL34 6NE
GORDON McPHATE
50 Llys Onnen
Llandudno Junction LL31 9EZ
Traditionalists prefer the secularisation narrative
From the Revd Dr David Heywood
Madam, — In his book The Clerical Profession, published in 1980, Anthony Russell charted the development of the 19th-century professional model for the role of the clergy, its persistence throughout the 20th century, and its increasingly dysfunctional nature. Towards the end of the book, he offers three perceptive and prescient future scenarios.
The first of these is the “Church of the traditionalist future”. “Among social institutions,” Russell writes, “churches are notable for their ability to persist in essentially unaltered forms despite profound changes in all other aspects of social life.” Accordingly, the Church of the traditionalist future is animated by “a strong sense of keeping faith with the past”. The traditionalist Church has an essentially static view of both society and the Church, and novelty and change are seen as a threat and strongly resisted. Its theological concerns are centred on the life of the Church, and it tends to see itself as “a faithful remnant keeping faith with the past and with former generations in an essentially secular and hostile world”.
Integral to the Church of the traditionalist future is the narrative of decline based on an acceptance of the inevitable effects of secularisation (“The ship of faith with the wind taken out of its sails”, Feature, 23 May). Only so can the upholders of the traditionalist Church maintain their self-image as a “faithful remnant”. This position, however, is vulnerable to evidence that decline may not be inevitable.
The great attraction of the narrative of decline based on secularisation for adherents of the traditionalist Church is that it exempts them from having to seek the reasons for decline in the shortcomings of the Church and allows them to rail against an agenda of “reform and renewal”. Rather than a ship with the wind taken out of its sails, it is a ship that is afraid to venture out of its home port.
DAVID HEYWOOD
5 Scholars Walk, Quedgeley
Gloucester GL2 4SQ
Separation over the Prayers of Love and Faith
From Canon Rob Kelsey
Madam, — The Revd Paul Burr is surely right to say (Letters, 23 May) that Canon Sam Wells and the Revd Lucy Winkett (Comment, 9 May) have a cognitive bias. This is a helpful concept, so long as we appreciate that it also applies to ourselves, not only to those with whom we disagree. I suspect that all individuals, groups, and societies have a cognitive bias of some kind or other.
Mr Burr asserts that the Bible is “tolerably clear” about its condemnation of same-sex relationships, and that “the City of God is not as inclusive as it has become fashionable to assume.” But the Bible is equally clear (depending on how one selects and interprets particular verses, in relation to other verses and the Bible as a whole) about, inter alia, the divine right of kings (Romans 13.1), the acceptability of slavery (1 Timothy 6.1-2), and the universality of salvation (1 Corinthians 15.22).
I willingly recognise my own cognitive bias, since being led to believe, as a teenager, that I could not be a real Christian, because I could not accept the theory of penal substitution, and subsequently discovering that other theories of the atonement existed which were equally, if not more, valid. I have a bias against self-styled “biblical Christians” who claim that there is only one valid (conservative) interpretation of the Bible, or — even worse — that they do not interpret the Bible at all, but simply follow its so-called “clear instructions”.
The Bible does not speak for itself, as some people suggest. Jesus interpreted the scriptures, and his Summary of the Law is open to interpretation. When we apply biblical truth to our own life and times, we need to adopt a hermeneutics of suspicion, towards both the text and ourselves. We all need to recognise, and take into account, our cognitive bias. (Matthew 7.3-5 springs to mind.)
ROB KELSEY
The Vicarage, Church Lane
Norham
Berwick upon Tweed TD15 2LF
From Canon Andrew Cornes
Madam, — Canon Sam Wells and the Revd Lucy Winkett, in their “open letter”, have some important things to say to the current Church of England.
But on one point, crucial to their argument, they are seriously mistaken. They state about “same-sex sexual activity”: “in the ancient world, such activity was invariably exploitative and oppressive, while lifelong, exclusive and loving, same-sex partnerships were unknown.” And later: “Lifelong and loving same-sex partnership is something unknown to the Bible.”
This is absolutely untrue. In the Greek and Roman worlds, the ideal in same-sex couples was a relationship of love, mutual devotion, reciprocal care, self-control, and commitment. Out of many examples, see Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus; Xenophon’s Symposium; Demosthenes’s Erotic Essay; Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love; and Lucian’s Affairs of the Heart.
The ideal relationship was also lifelong. Plato’s Symposium is written in honour of Agathon, whose relationship with Pausanias was until death parted them.
St Paul knew all about this, not only through common knowledge, but also because Tarsus was especially known for same-sex relationships (Dio Chrysostom 33.37-64; Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana 1.12).
Of course, some relationships, same-sex and opposite-sex, were manipulative and exploitative in the Greek and Roman worlds, as they are today. But the large majority of same-sex relationships that are celebrated in Greek and Roman philosophy, history, poetry, plays, novels, and visual material (sculpture and vases) were loving, generous, tender, and committed.
And these relationships were included in the New Testament word porneia, which, as Ms Winkett and Canon Wells rightly say, “indicates transgressive sexual behaviour in general” and, when used by Jews and Christians, “intended to prohibit same-sex sexual activity” as well as all other sex outside heterosexual marriage.
Sadly, this misreading of what the New Testament writers were commenting on and teaching seriously undermines an “open letter” that, in parts, has some important points to make about the “breadth, length, height, and depth” of God’s demanding but generous love.
ANDREW CORNES
20 Gorringe Road
Eastbourne BN22 8XL
From Canon Paul Oestreicher
Madam, — With the Revd Lucy Winkett’s and Canon Sam Wells’s open letter I find myself in profound agreement. They and their communities at London’s heart are exemplary. Yet, cannot the Good News be stated even more simply? “Behold, I make all things new” is as true now as it was in the first century. Jesus told his disciples that there was much they did not yet understand, but the Holy Spirit would lead them to the truth. That goes on happening every day of our lives. The Christian God, in the relational mystery of three “persons”, is not static, but dynamic. Heaven help us if we allow ourselves to be trapped in dogma.
That we should disagree in understanding the mind of God is part of our fallible humanity. We should celebrate it. When it comes to the nature of our sexuality, we do not yet fully understand it. Science might help us rather than inherited customs. The dynamic God-in-process is always with us and in us.
Leaving sexuality aside, I had parishioners in my Blackheath parish, naval officers, training the crews of our nuclear-armed submarines. Though their work was celebrated recently in Westminster Abbey, I held it to be profoundly evil and said so. Why most Christians, especially the biblical fundamentalists, can live comfortably with nuclear weapons, when Jesus bids us love our enemies, I find hard to understand. Nevertheless, at the eucharist, those officers and I are one as redeemed sinners. Our human differences, in the light of the divine compassion, pale into insignificance.
All that we can do to follow Jesus is to love each other, be it in Sudan, in Gaza, in our street, in our family — and even in our Church.
PAUL OESTREICHER
42/8 Leeds Street, Te Aro
Wellington 6011
Aotearoa New Zealand
From Canon Tess Kuin Lawton
Madam, — How very biblical we are! Just as in Jesus’s lifetime, just as in Paul’s, the faithful are rejoicing in their divisions and promoting their defensive positions. Argument, faction, hate, and fear are as old as creation itself.
God sent Jesus to show us a better way. When we are decimated by the pain of division and cruel words, we can ask for God’s help in making us more Christlike: help to hear the unheard voices and courage to discern what the Spirit is doing in their lives.
Can we pray for the grace to love one another and the courage to listen deeply and with an open heart to those who, in faith, disagree with us? Can we practise the humility of Peter at Joppa that we might not have the complete picture of God’s vision for us? Can we build up one another in faith through encouragement and in prayer and thanksgiving? Can we?
TESS KUIN LAWTON
10 The Close
Winchester SO23 9LS
Bruno Latour and his philosophy of science
From Dr Jonathan Bridge
Madam, — Interested as I was to read Canon Robin Gill’s review of Bruno Latour’s If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls (Books, 23 May), I feel bound to correct two points of detail, one trivial and another more consequential.
Latour’s Gifford Lectures were delivered in 2013, not 2015; and Latour was not an earth scientist. Indeed, since in his long career as a philosopher of science Latour went to great lengths to describe and elevate the unique conditions of knowledge and practice developed and made distinct by different research disciplines, he might be horrified to be so mis-remembered.
In the later part of his career, Latour did turn his focus to the study of the earth and our relationships with it; he could, I suppose, have consented to be called a scholar of the terrestrial. In those Gifford Lectures, he used the term “Earthbound” to describe the situation in which human beings exist, a state into which we are (re)emerging from the protective envelope of the modern. But the earth that we are emerging into is not the earth that we imagine (even those of us who do identify as geoscientists), and our position within it is far more complicated and entangled than any of us know.
That this must be identified as a problem for religious as well as secular humans was central to Latour’s enthusiasm for Laudato Si’. A revitalised, political ecology of the end of times is at the heart of both Latour’s and Pope Francis’s analysis of this problem — in particular, the recognition of our own precarity and connectedness within a “New Climatic Regime”. As another great scholar of these precarious times, Donna Jeanne Haraway, has said, we need to learn how to “stay with the trouble”. It is what we choose to do here which counts.
JONATHAN BRIDGE
Institute of Social Sciences
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield S1 1WB
Israel’s ‘apartheid’?
From the Revd Jonathan Frais
Madam, — The Revd David Haslam (Letters, 16 May) writes of the apartheid system in Gaza and likens it to that formerly in South Africa. But two differences should be noted.
One, in the majority of Israel, instead of segregation, you will find equal access for Jew and Arab to education, hospital, and elections, as well as benches, buses, and shops.
Two, with the Gaza Strip, the security controls are a response to unreturned hostages and the Hamas promise of another “7 October”. Perhaps we should find another word.
JONATHAN FRAIS
11 Coverdale Avenue
Bexhill-on-Sea TN39 4TY
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