God's hand in General Synod politics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/jan/18/god-general-synod-politics

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The General Synod's house of laity this afternoon decisively rejected a vote of no confidence in its chair, Philip Giddings, who had given a short, eloquent speech against the female bishops legislation when that failed to gain a sufficient majority in November. That was a shocking and unexpected outcome to the debate, which left a lot of people very angry indeed. It hinged on the capture, at the last synod elections, of a large block of seats in the house of laity by the conservative evangelicals. Giddings is a leader of this conservative tendency. He is an experienced and accomplished church politician whose signature is to present his side as a majority despite its unpopularity in the wider church.

So, on a purely political level, this vote was simply an attempt to punish him and his side for their tactical victory in November. But what else could he have done then, given his convictions? As his supporters pointed out, the chairs of the other two houses in the synod both intervened in favour of female bishops and no one is calling for them to resign for lacking impartiality.

The whole thing is full of cant and sanctimonious backstabbing – but so is all synodical politics. And that's what interests me. Anglicans are committed to the idea that in some sense God takes an interest in the doings of the synod and steers it towards the right outcome in its votes. They open their sessions with a prayer that this may happen and some debates – where no one much cares about the outcome – are conducted in a genuine spirit of humility.

In most debates, though, both sides are convinced that God is with them and both fight as dirtily as the feel they need to do to win. The resulting spectacle is horrible. My friend Stephen Bates lost what religious faith he had from covering church politics, but this isn't an indictment of the synod in particular. I know a student at Cambridge who lost her faith from studying the workings of the Council of Nicaea. God, she felt, could not be found by bishops who tried to pull each others' beards off.

One response is to say that these politics are not real Christianity. Jesus would have nothing to do with emperors or synods, or, if he did, would say something so wonderfully profound and perceptive that everyone would follow him at once. But it's difficult to suppose that God has nothing to do with the deliberations of church bodies. Churches, at least, have to believe that he cares about what they get up to. You can't quite imagine the pope solemnly declaring that God takes no interest in his opinions – even though, in practice, that's what most believers actually believe: that God takes an interest in some decisions, but not others. He cares, perhaps, what the General Synod decides about female bishops, but not about its opinions on parochial fees. Or he cares a lot about whether the church should serve fairtrade coffee, but not at all about the opinions of the archbishop of Canterbury.

This is sane enough but logically quite indefensible. Christians have Jesus's word for it that God marks the fall of every sparrow: how much more the fall of every following motion in the synod?

And it's an aspect of a much wider problem. Church politics are only politics, after all, and the way that things are decided in the world doesn't conduce to a belief in a benevolent providence, or in simple progress. So getting rid of God doesn't solve the problem. If the world around us is simply the outcome of brute chance, what grounds do we have to hope for a better one or what reason to work towards it?

Perhaps these questions have only rhetorical answers, which would suggest there is something wrong with them, but looking out of my window now I prefer to believe that God does care about the house of laity, and he has sent a blizzard to punish them by trapping them in each others' company for the next three days.