Nervous About Nuance

As human beings, we are good at finding ways to justify ourselves. As Christians, we often chose the argument or explanation that suits the position we want to hold. Am I the only one who used to read the footnotes in my Bible giving alternative readings and then choose the one that supported what I already believed?

Now, because of my personality and training, I tend towards appreciating nuance. While simple explanations are often elegant and I do think Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation) is a generally valid principle, experience suggests that real-world problems are often complex and nuance is necessary to be precise.

However, it's possible to use nuance (or less charitably sophistry and casuistry) to support the position we want to be true. Most of us have done this in an argument (even if just with ourselves!) and we know it's dangerous. As evangelicals who want to come under the Word of God, we need to be especially careful of this. We might be a little more sophisticated than the younger version of me choosing his preferred reading. In fact, one observation would be that the more theologically sophisticated we are, the more competent we are at finding a compelling route to self-justification.

Evangelicals In The Church of England

I wonder if one of the major reasons we see evangelicals leaving the Church of England, especially the clergy, is when they finally run out of nuances and explanations for staying in that satisfy them. From the moment I entered the selection process, I entered the world of nuance. Selection seemed to be a game to be played where you had to maintain your evangelicalism without torpedoing the process. At ordination, you needed an understanding of how you would submit to your (perhaps catholic, perhaps liberal) bishop and so on.

Why Women Bishops' Were The Final Straw For Me

Some of these arguments are more compelling than others. Some tend a little more in the direction of sophistry. For me, the final straw was the introduction of women bishops. As a complementarian I think this is wrong, as I had thought that the ordination of women to be church leaders was wrong. The latter had caused me quite a few problems, but I viewed it as a secondary issue, believed the church when they said they wanted complementarians to thrive in the two integrity system and still felt the Church of England was something worth fighting for. I'm not sure any of those positions were wholly correct in practice, but that is for another post.

The introduction of women bishops was a step too far in the nuance. I think there were probably ways it could have been done that I would have found less of a struggle, but I think the way it was done was to create that struggle, i.e. to create a situation where the difficult would leave and the more pliable would compromise.

Two things about the way it was introduced became barriers for me. First, if a woman was appointed as your diocesan bishop, it seemed to me that the solution of a flying bishop with delegated authority from the diocesan did not resolve the issue of the diocesan over your local church (contra 1 Timothy 2:12 in my understanding). Secondly, as part of the legislation the church brought in 5 Guiding Principles, to which assent was going to be required. Conservative evangelicals have their argument for why they can assent to them, although I'm not sure how happy they would be with that approach to assent to the Thirty Nine Articles. For me, it wasn't something I would have been willing to assent to. It was a compromise and I wish conservative evangelicals had refused at that point. It would have at least called out a process and a decision that in no way respected the conservative evangelical conscience or the promises made at the time of agreement to the ordination of women. It should perhaps be no surprise to find that relatively quickly there was pressure to remove even the limited protection provided to conservatives.

Why Evangelicals Have Different 'Final Straws'

For others, the straw was the ordination of women, the baptism service for transgender people or the prayers recommended by the Living in Love and Faith process. Part of the issue of trying to explain leaving is often that there is a nuance, an explanation of the thing that was your straw. This allows it to be reframed as a conscience issue. I'm not sure that's correct. I think it's more a cumulative issue where something finally causes you to see the problem. For me, this decision pushed me back to various other things I had accepted and made me see I had compromised repeatedly. I think this has been true for others who left and is often described using the image of the frog being slowed boiled that does not jump out of the water because the change in temperature is so slow. To push the analogy, particular decisions push the temperature up and sometimes the change is just enough to make some of us jump.

A Problem For Evangelical Unity?

I think this is why evangelicals outside the Church of England are often bemused by the compromises that their friends in the Church of England seem to be making and the (in their eyes) increasingly bizarre explanations. The nuances look like sophistry. It's why I can look in from the outside horrified at what I see as compromises made by friends who have stayed and why they can look at me and think I'm unduly harsh, as they have good reasons (in their eyes) for thinking of themselves as faithful.

It seems to me this has become a problem for evangelical unity. Within the independent church circles I now move in, there are definitely different views as to the level of fellowship that is now appropriate (perhaps more of that another time). A unity of sorts that had gradually been built after the Lloyd-Jones and Stott disagreement has begun to fracture again. I actually think that is both sad, but also probably right. I don't think the arguments for staying have a nuance that leads to precision, rather they seem to have nuance that leads to confusion and an unfaithful fudge.