A favourite writer of mine is that turbulent priest Richard Holloway, ‘controversial’ former Bishop of Edinburgh, so I am glad to see that he has published his autobiography, recently sympathetically reviewed by Andrew Motion. I look forward to reading it, partly in the hope that it will shed light on a phenomenon that I have wondered about for some time. 
It is now 160 years or so since ‘higher criticism’ studies in German universities such as Tübingen began challenging assumptions about the Bible and the very concept of an uncreated ‘God’ as an ‘objective referent.’ In all that period ordinands in Western Europe and North America have been at least partly trained in the knowledge that this kind of radical theological thinking existed and moreover had attractive and convincing ideas to offer. Some of those ordinands, of course, became bishops.
Leaving aside those bishops who are consecrated because they are likely to be good area managers rather than spiritual directors, my question is this: what sort of accommodations does a bishop have to make within his own mind and spirit between his awareness of this ever-expanding torrent of radical thinking on the one hand, and his duties as a proclaimer of the Good News on the other? Especially if he is married, as the Archbishop of Canterbury is, to a theologian?
It must be a struggle, in so many ways. I remember reading a passage in a book by John Shelby Spong, another firebrand in the episcopal church, in which he described the incredulity and hostility with which parishioners greeted his attempts to explain the origins of the Nativity story. What do bishops think that they can get away with, in terms of theological interchange between themselves and ordinary people in the pew?
I find it interesting to note that now, in this age when most Westerners have no need for a “God” concept in their lives and do not feel guilty about it, leaders of the church are conspicuously knowledgeable about the faith. Rowan Williams, for example, has been a professor of theology in both Oxford and Cambridge; Benedict XVI was a professor at Regensburg and elsewhere; and Bartholomew I, the present Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has lectured at the Pontifical Gregorian in Rome.
These are men of learning. Will they be able to translate the faith for modern ears in the time allotted to them?
Richard Holloway has moved away from the church but he has also thereby liberated himself to think the unthinkable, propose the unimaginable. If he, as well as significant voices of leadership still within the church, can persuade us that it is all right to accept religion as a code for all that we hope for, believe, trust and struggle to understand, the largest and most telling of all the works of imagination and art that humankind has ever produced, he will have bridged the gap or at least shown how we might do so. I look forward to reading his book, as much as I thanked him personally for the others, when I met him six or seven years ago. It was an honour.
