Thinking Anglicans

Opinion – 31 May 2025

Church in Wales Statement of the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales on the Supreme Court ruling regarding the legal definition of a woman

Mark Clavier Well-Tempered Why I Love the Church Year (Even Lent)

Andrew Brown The slow deep hover The Bishop who didn’t believe a word of it

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David Hawkins
David Hawkins
1 day ago

I was baptised into the Church of England and live in Berlin but have found my spiritual home at St Woolas Cathedral in Newport. If you want to know why you would do well to read the Statement of the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales on the Supreme Court ruling regarding the legal definition of a woman. This document has much wider significance than the Supreme Court ruling because it addresses what it means to be a child of God. You don’t have to be Transgender to feel that you don’t fit in or that you are… Read more »

Kyle Johansen
Kyle Johansen
Reply to  David Hawkins
1 day ago

The Bishops say ‘every human’, but if the ruling had gone the way would they have written the same statement expressing sympathy for women who want privacy/safety or who have trauma? If we accept that they would not, then they have picked a side. And if they have picked a side then from what principles has this come from? They don’t give any – all they have is unequal weights. (On an unrelated note – we are not all children of God, but only those who have faith in Jesus and have ‘put on’ Christ being given His Spirit that… Read more »

Baptist Trainfan
Baptist Trainfan
Reply to  Kyle Johansen
18 hours ago

What grounds have you for saying, “If we accept that they would not …”?

Pat ONeill
Pat ONeill
Reply to  Kyle Johansen
12 hours ago

Jesus defines the phrase somewhat differently:

Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.

Kyle Johansen
Kyle Johansen
Reply to  Pat ONeill
10 hours ago

‘ What grounds have you for saying, “If we accept that they would not …”?’ It’s an ‘if’, and it comes from having even a bare awareness of Church in Wales and the fact that there have been many victories for the trans-movement and my not being familiar with any calls to remember that abused women who would want to go to a shelter without any men are children of God. But we can never prove what would happen in a counterfactual world. ‘ Jesus defines the phrase somewhat differently:’ Is everyone a peacemaker then? Because unless everyone is a… Read more »

Ruairidh
Ruairidh
1 day ago

Thanks so much for the human interest time capsule from Andrew Brown on the late John Shelby Spong. From the article: ” ‘ I’m not a professional theologian’, said the bishop. ‘ I make no bones of that. I’m a communicator.’ ” Spong was actually a great popularizer. As a best seller he managed to get ideas that were current in the scholarship of the day in front of a popular audience. Anyone who read Spong and who had also read scholars like John Hick, Edward Schillebeeckx, Wolfhart Panneberg, or Hans Kung ( the latter a hybrid of erudition and… Read more »

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Ruairidh
1 day ago

It was Rowan Williams who spoke of amateur hour. Just in the FWIW category, Pannenberg would be bemused at the idea of being included with these other names. I was a doctoral student at Munich during the Kung dustup. Pannenberg had nothing to do with colleagues on the Catholic Faculty. Maybe find another name to put alongside these. Spong would have been Mr Bean to him, if he had any idea who he was. Have a great day.

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Anglican Priest
1 day ago

Pannenburg on the topic de jour. “Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal… Read more »

Ruairidh
Ruairidh
Reply to  Anglican Priest
1 day ago

Yeah I think Panneberg’s unfortunate opinion on that issue is well known among those of us who have read him, along with his views on the two natures doctrine and the virgin birth where he is less preachy about what is ‘normative’ biblical or otherwise. So pick your favorite horse of his. Of course he is not Hick, he was Pannenberg.

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Ruairidh
16 hours ago

You included him with a list of people, the implication being they were on the same wave length.

That is simply not true when it comes to Pannenberg.

He was proud of his orthodox Lutheran bona fides.

Rod ( Rory) Gillis
Rod ( Rory) Gillis
Reply to  Anglican Priest
11 hours ago

Tangential to my point.

John Davies
John Davies
Reply to  Anglican Priest
1 day ago

Must admit, I only read one Spong book, “The Sins of the Scriptures” and, quite simply, couldn’t agree with him. To me he seemed more concerned to undermine faith than anything else – someone else remarked that when one of his books was hailed by a leading US atheist society as their book of the year, surely it should have told the church something?
But then it takes all sort to make a world, or a church.

Ruairidh
Ruairidh
Reply to  Anglican Priest
1 day ago

First good to see you back. I took it from your comment on the May 3rd thread that you had left TA. I didn’t even have time to get through all eight stages of grief. It is like a mini Easter, a little while and you won’t see me and a little while and you will. Just joshing you. lol. Thanks, but that is really all beside the point i.e. Spong popularizing ideas from academia. Spong questioning the virgin birth, and any number of erudite academics/theologians questioning the same, including Pannenberg, although for him Resurrection was the big ticket event.… Read more »

Andrew Godsall
Andrew Godsall
Reply to  Ruairidh
13 hours ago

Very helpful summary Ruairidh. Thank you for it. Anglican Priest disappears from time to time but then emerges with another name, so don’t be too surprised. I was taught by John Hick, David Ford, Dan Hardy and others as an undergraduate just after The Myth of God incarnate had been published. The theologians you refer to were all part of the study and nothing John Spong said would have been out of place. That there has been a backlash against that kind of enquiry in (some) church circles is troubling. And continues to trouble me. John Hick was the most… Read more »

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Andrew Godsall
11 hours ago

It’s come back to me. Rowan said it was what was expected from a sixth former. A kind comment after all. Be well.

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Andrew Godsall
10 hours ago

“That’s just not Rowan’s style” says Mr Godsall.

“The implication of the [Spong] theses is that the sort of questions that might be asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila. The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.”

Rowan Williams.

Rod ( Rory) Gillis
Rod ( Rory) Gillis
Reply to  Andrew Godsall
10 hours ago

Thanks. Always interestimg to hear from folks who have had first hand experience with some of these very bright creative thinkers. To your first point there is a Robert Palmer song that reminds me of some of us who are habitual at TA. ” might as well face it your’ re addicted to ….blog” ha ha. My apologies to the lyricist of Addicted to Love”. Lol.

Baptist Trainfan
Baptist Trainfan
Reply to  Ruairidh
1 day ago

I only had one encounter with Spong, at a public lecture in Colchester c.2010. I’m afraid that the graciousness described above did not seem to be in evidence; his response to questions was prickly and dismissive; he came over as arrogant. Even his supporters were not impressed and did not ask for a return visit when one was offered. Perhaps he was less at ease in the British context than the American one.

Ruairidh
Ruairidh
Reply to  Baptist Trainfan
1 day ago

I never saw the man in person. I can’t speak to his personality. One of our local parishes brought him in at one point. I read a couple of his books simply because he was in fact very popular and folks were asking me what I thought about him. I said above that I don’t know who he may have been reading exactly; but in fact I do know he was reading the late Raymond Brown because Brown writes about it in the supplemental section of his, Birth of the Messiah which I referenced above. And on that subject, I… Read more »

James
James
Reply to  Baptist Trainfan
20 hours ago

I disagree. I heard him speak at Gladstone’s library, Hawarden, a place to which he was no stranger. There he was both gracious and engaging.

Baptist Trainfan
Baptist Trainfan
Reply to  James
18 hours ago

Fair enough – I may have caught him on an off-day (we all have them!). Nevertheless, on that night, he did not relate well to a generally supportive audience.

Andrew Brown
Reply to  Ruairidh
18 hours ago

I now think he was really a world class bullshitter, in the sense that he had no interest in the truth of his words, but a tremendously well developed sense of their reception, and of his audiences’ desires. This went along with his charm and his undoubted kindness to strangers. I don’t mean he was a bad man, only that he had no sense that a theological statement might be true or false; only what its social valence would be.

Sceptic
Sceptic
Reply to  Andrew Brown
16 hours ago

When we abandon Scripture as a divinely donated norm, and cease striving that our consciences be captive to the Word of God, then bullshit, of one form or another is all that remains. Theology just becomes a competition in the ability to bullshit most convincingly. Indeed it essentially becomes what atheistic secular philosophy has become. An arena in which a man can ‘become’ a woman by declaring that that is what s/he is. In which terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ no longer carry any actual ontological heft, but can, like the words of humpty dumpty, mean whatever we want them… Read more »

Pax
Pax
Reply to  Andrew Brown
15 hours ago

He could read a room brilliantly, discerning allies to enlist and enemies to villify, often turning his wit and eloquence in a powerful tour de force against much punier opponents who had the temerity to disagree with him. A showman or a bully?

Anglican Priest
Anglican Priest
Reply to  Pax
11 hours ago

Nice summary.

Ruairidh
Ruairidh
Reply to  Andrew Brown
14 hours ago

Thanks for your article. Appreciated it. I only knew him from his books and the occasional media interview. The fact that your piece was based on a fairly intensive encounter with Spong from back in the day is what makes it so interesting. I commented that he was not a theologian but a popularizer of theologians. That kind of thing can lead to sensationalism and certainly oversimplification. What you describe as Spong giving priority to the social valence of religious ideas is one way into appreciating him. Spong had a social and political context, as you note in your piece.… Read more »

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