On not properly resourcing General Synod
by Martin Davie:
When I attended my first meeting of the General Synod in November 1999 I sat in on a debate about the translation of the Nicene Creed. At the centre of this debate was an involved discussion of the best way to translate the Greek word ek in relation to Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary. Should it be translated ‘of’ or ‘from’?
This might seem to be incredibly arcane debate, but those engaged in it rightly thought that it mattered. The reason that it mattered was that the translation question raised important issues about how we should understand and express the central claim of the Christian faith that God became Man for our salvation in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
These issues needed to be resolved because it was important that what the Church of England said in its liturgy bore the most truthful witness possible concerning this matter. Because liturgy is the Church’s public corporate declaration of what it believes it behoved the Church of England to take as much trouble as was necessary to get its liturgy right.
I was reminded of this early experience of General Synod when I looked at the two briefing papers, GS 2071A from the Revd Chris Newlands and GS2017B from the Secretary General William Nye, which were published yesterday to resource the forthcoming Synod debate on a motion from the Diocese of Blackburn calling the House of Bishops to consider commending liturgies to mark gender transition.
What struck me was the contrast between the theological seriousness of the debate on the translation of the Nicene Creed back in 1999 and the almost complete lack of theological seriousness shown in these two new resource papers. Neither of these papers attempts to address the key issue at the heart of the debate about the Blackburn motion, which is whether it would be theologically correct for the Church of England to express in its liturgy the belief that someone who is biologically male can nonetheless be a woman and that someone who is biologically female can nonetheless be a man. If the Church of England develops liturgies to mark gender transition, as Newlands invites it to do, then this is what it will be saying.
Neither of the resource papers explore either the grounds on which some people believe this belief to be true or the very serious grounds on which others (like me) believe that it is completely false. [1]
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