On January 28, 2026, Sarah
Mullally became the first woman to occupy the seat of the archbishop of
Canterbury, which is the spiritual leader of the Church of England under its
governor, the British King (or Queen) and of the worldwide Anglican Communion,
which includes the Episcopal Church. The King (or Queen) being above the
archbishop in the Church of England is in line with Thomas Hobbes’
seventeenth-century theory that the sovereign should be in charge of church and
state lest civil war break out (again). Just as a British king is a man and a
queen is a woman, so too, as of 2026, the Archbishop of Canterbury could be a
man or a woman. This of course set the Anglicans even further off from the
Roman Catholic Church, where only men can be priests and bishops, including that
of Rome (i.e., the Pope). I contend that the intransigence on this point is due
to a logical error involving a category mistake just for added fun.
The Confirmation of Election
service out of which Mullaly became the Archbishop of Canterbury “marks a
milestone for the Church of England, which ordained its first female priests in
1994 and its first female bishop in 2015.”[1]
That was not long before 2026, so progressives in that Church had reason to be
astounded as the swiftness of the change. In no small measure, the relative
progressive stance of King Charles after his conservative mother, Queen
Elizabeth, enabled the first woman to occupy the position in just a decade
after the first woman was made a bishop in the Church of England. The tremendous
change in the societal role of woman in the West since the early 1970s and the
effect of this change on how all of Jesus’s disciples being men in the Gospels has
been perceived differently can also be said to be factors in Mulally’s confirmation
as the archbishop. Seeing in the contemporary world that women are perfectly
capable of leading large organizations and even governments, Christians would
be more likely to view the all-male discipleship in the Gospels as reflecting
the societal context of Jesus or the writers of the Gospels and thus as not
bearing for the contemporary world. Additionally, the point that just because
Jesus selects only men in the Gospels doesn’t in itself mean that only men could
be disciples could back up the historical-context argument.
Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus
say that only men can be disciples; were that line in the stories, then
adjusting to the modern context would be more difficult from a theological
standpoint. One of the problems with the notion of scripture is that
everything in it must be taken as truth, so distinguishing, for example,
between Paul’s personal opinion on women as leaders and a theological point
that women should not be leaders in the Church is unfortunately difficult to
do, if not utterly forbidden. That Paul’s stance on female leaders is so
obviously his opinion, likely reflective of the world in which he lived, raises
the thornier problem of including letters written to churches as part of
scripture. Once a document has been declared to be scriptural, separating the
wheat from the chaff becomes very difficult if not impossible from a
theological standpoint. This is reflected in the opposition to Mullally’s
appointment.
“Gafcon, a global organization of
conservative Anglicans, says Mullally’s appointment is divisive because a
majority of the Anglican Communion still believes only men should be bishops.”[2]
In the Gospels, however, Jesus does not say, “Only men should be bishops,” and
that he chooses only men is descriptive rather than normative. Hume’s
naturalist fallacy holds that you can’t get normativity from a statement that is
only descriptive. In other words, you can’t get “ought” out of “is”; something
more is needed to say that what is, should be. If, for example, Jesus is to
say, “only men should be my disciples” in the Gospels, the readers would expect
a justification to also be stated as to why only men should be in the
religious role. If there is a theological justification, readers would
naturally expect Jesus to state it.
These problems aside, that the
Roman Catholic Church had come to recognize Mary Magdalene as the Apostle to
the Apostles may undercut that sect’s insistence that only men can (and should)
be priests and bishops, especially since the discovery of the Gospel of Mary
Magdalene in which she occupies a significant place in Jesus’s ministry. So
perhaps more stunning than the swift change in the Church of England in the
appointment of Mullally is the utter stubbornness of social-religious
conservatives in that Church as well as in the Church of Rome.
Moreover, that matters given
scant if any attention in the Gospels (hence excluding Paul’s personal letters
to his congregations) have been so easily blown out of proportion many centuries
after the Gospels were written, such as homosexuality, gender and the
priesthood, and even abortion, demonstrates the vulnerability of the human mind’s
self-check mechanism in the domain of religion (and politics). Religion loses
its core element of transcendence and is instead so easily filled with personal
ideology, in which is none other than self-love as self-idolatry. Rather than
having compassion for “thy enemies,” ideological worship of oneself belies Jesus’s
message in the Gospels on how to enter the Kingdom of God. Ironically,
compassion even to the marginalized is in line with Paul’s dictum not to cause
one’s brother (or sister) to stumble.
Lest this be viewed as an unabashedly progressive stance, it should be observed that feminist interpretations of the Gospels’ contents can easily replace theology with (feminist) ideology, such that the religion that results is in the very image of the feminists themselves. The same can be said of remaking Christianity according to queer theory. Such extravagances are just as damaging as reducing Christianity to opposition to abortion and homosexuality even though those two topics are not mentioned scarcely at all directly in the Gospels, and blowing one’s inferences out of proportion such that the religious text is distended beyond recognition is itself a manifestation of self-idolatrous ideology.
I contend
that were Christian sects to actually follow Jesus’s principles, conservative
clergy would be oriented to serving the groups despised rather than fighting
against them, and feminist and gay laity would serve conservative men in the clergy
in respect to their humane needs. The last are first, and many of the first are
actually last unless they put themselves after those whom they loath.
Therefore, the conservative Anglican clergymen who opposed Mullally’s
appointment were actually obliged as Christians to become servants of the female
Archbishop of Canterbury, essentially washing her feet rather than castigating
her as if being a female bishop rendered her as the Anti-Christ. Compassion for
one’s detractors and those whom one dislikes does not imply agreement; rather,
it is to begin the chore of expanding human nature to become a bridge of sorts
to the Kingdom of God already in this world.
2. Ibid.
