Can bishops save the Church?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
Earlier this week, Adrian Hilton (who writes the Archbishop Cranmer blog) reprised his hosting of Martyn Percy’s views with the offering of a new set of 95 Theses, in the year of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s original. (Contrary to suggestions in online discussion, Luther’s are not dull and rambling, and are worth a read. They form a progressive argument against indulgences in a developing sequence, and were written as a sixteenth-century proposal for an academic disputing—so if they are not quite as succinct as a Twitter post then perhaps we should not be surprised.)
In contrast to Luther (and setting aside the tongue-in-cheek pretentiousness of such a comparison), Percy’s proposals are rather thin, and noticeably repetitive. The comparison with a ‘mess of pottage’ (from Esau’s trading of his birthright in Gen 25.29) occurs more than once, and the central assertion, that bishops should be pastor-theologians and not managerial leaders, is repeated in different forms through the list, though not particularly in a way which develops the argument. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the list is that I agree with Percy’s central premise, that the central calling of bishops is to have spiritual vision, and not simply be pragmatic management gurus.
Doctrine is vital for the life of the church. Bishops need to know it, guard it and teach it. Bishops who cannot teach faithfully and ably are failing in one of their core callings.
As I have expounded previously, simply drawing on the etymology of ‘episcopacy’ tells us that this role is in part about having vision, seeing the lie of the land, the bigger picture, and what needs to happen—and then seeing that it gets done. So there is a role of implementation, but that finds its place in the context of visionary leadership. What we disagree about is what kind of vision bishops should have.
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