Hypocritical Bishops and a Deeper Problem

The case of Dominic Cummings seems to be dividing the nation. So much so, that many Church of England Bishops thought it was a good thing to weigh in. The Archbishop Cranmer blog wrote a rather withering response. In particular he focused on my old Bishop, the Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, issuing a kind of ultimatum about the need for repentance and the sacking of Cummings if the Church of England is to be able to work with the government.

Now I'm no expert on lockdown restrictions, the circumstances of Dominic Cumming's family or what they did or didn't do. So I'm going to refrain from commenting on that one. However, the response of the Bishops both irritated and amused me.

Let's just pick apart what they're saying and we'll do it by assuming that they are right and Dominic Cummings did break lockdown restrictions (whether or not he did). So the logic is something like this:

1. A senior employee worked for an organisation that set some guidelines/rules/laws.
2. The senior employee broke those guidelines/rules/laws.
3. The organisation should apologise/repent.
4. The employee should be sacked/resign.

So let's take, that and apply it to some of those cuddly bishops and the Church of England.

1. The Church of England has lots of guidelines, rules and laws - whether from bishops, synods, canons or foundational documents like they 39 Articles or the Prayer Book. It also has lots of senior employees (bishops, archdeacons and the like).
2. Lots of those senior employees, e.g. bishops, archdeacons and the like, have been experienced to regularly ignore these guidelines, rules and laws for their own ends. Examples abound around clergy in civil partnerships, marriage-like services for gay couples in churches and that's before we go to more foundational things around the canons, ordination and consecration promises which they routinely ignore prefering their own opinions to that of the Church of England on Scripture and truth.
3. So by their own logic presumably the Church of England needs to show some repentance for this.
4. And presumably quite few bishops, archdeacons etc. need to be sacked/resign. Actually they get promoted, but that another story.

The problem, of course, is hypocrisy. Something pointed out on various of the Twitter feeds. Jesus was quite strong with hypocritical relgious leaders (Mark 7:6-8 for example), which should be a warning to bishops and Christian ministers alike. We need to be careful about putting ourselves in the position of having the log in our own eye (Matthew 7:1-5) and casting the first stone (John 8:7)!

But there is a deeper problem for all of us, is there not? We very easily end up putting ourselves in the position of the Pharisee instead of the tax collector in Jesus' parable, Luke 18:9-14. Not only do we point out the sin of others, but we think that we, ourselves, are righteous.

Bishop David and his episcopal colleagues seem to me to have got themselves in a mess here. So obsessed are we with speaking truth to power, we've forgotten to speak grace to fellow sinners. Instead of grace, in fact, Bishop David went with a rule-based righteousness in a BBC interview. Having rightly suggested that leaving us to our instincts is risky (original sin anyone?). He then suggests that rules are the way forward. Perhaps he would have gone further given the chance, but it was a sad and fundamentally unchristian place to stop (e.g. Galatians 2:16; 3:11). 

If Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson have done wrong here, then I hope they do repent. And the call to repentance is not a wrong one. It's just that it's a universal call. I, like many others, would like to see some true repentance and faith in some of our bishops. I have a particular vested interest in seeing that from Bishop David! But as I hope and pray for that, I come as a sinner and a hypocrite, who cries out to the Lord for forgiveness on the basis of his death on the cross. I can't come as a self-righteous hypocrite.

Much has been made of this not being a "good look" for the the Conservatives. Let me say that this doesn't seem a particularly good look for the bishops either. Self-righteous hypocrisy, seldom is!