Geographical episcopacy – a further response to Charlie Bell
by Martin Davie:
In my previous article on this site I responded to Charlie Bell’s article ‘Finding a way through’ by explaining that the proposal put forward by the Church of England Evangelical Council and the wider Alliance movement for a provincial solution to the current divisions over marriage and sexual ethics in the Church of England is not contrary to Anglican ecclesiology and would allow both liberals and conservatives in the Church of England to get what they want. Given that this is the case, I finished my post by asking why this proposal is considered problematic by Bell and others on the liberal side.
Bell’s response to my article was to post the following on X:
‘Au contraire, Mr Davie. The position you set out here in both unachievable within Anglican ecclesiology (hello geographical nature of the episcopate) and this demonstrable nonsense as a starting point. Folks, you gotta do better than this.’
If we set aside the unsubstantiated claim that what I wrote was ‘demonstrable nonsense’ what we find is that Bell’s objection to the provincial proposal is that it is out of line with Anglican ecclesiology because of the ‘geographical nature of the episcopate.’
In the remainder of this article I am going to look at the issue of the ‘geographical nature of the episcopate’ and explain why it does not preclude the provincial solution to the current divisions in the Church of England advocated by CEEC and the Alliance.
When thinking about the nature of the episcopate the first thing that need to be understood is that the first bishops of the Church were the apostles. They were the people who were given authority by Christ to exercise oversight (episcope) over the elders, deacons and lay people of the earliest churches.
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