Andrew Marr

I'm very pleased to hear that Andrew Marr is recovering, but still shocked by his stroke. ... I've been a long-term fan of his, ever since coming across him as a columnist on the Independent back in 1994. He seems to me to exemplify something of the best of what journalism can be. There's a real moral and intellectual gravity: he knows that ideas matter and that there are deeper currents beneath the political and economic froth of the news. A boldness in being willing to spot patterns, sometimes before all the evidence is fully in: this it seems to me is the particular thing journalists can do above all, and it's also what makes him such a consistently interesting historian. And an underlying sense of fun which stops him from taking himself or the whole business at all seriously: he communicates a mischievous sense of relish which manages to cheer up almost anything. Plus he can write. I'm tempted to say that, for a Scot who studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, these qualities are hardly surprising. Still, for my money he's one of the most interesting people in modern Britain. Get well soon.

Women bishops again

Happy New Year to all. And with it, more thoughts on this still unresolved problem. Not whether Synod can somehow be persuaded to break the deadlock in the summer, but on the fundamentals underlying it.

In short, in all the discussion about women bishops, we've been worrying about women. But should we perhaps be worrying about bishops?

Full disclosure: I am wholly unpersuaded that bishops are jure divino, or indeed that they are anything more than a pragmatic governing structure which any Christian church can choose to adopt or discard as it sees fit. I don't object to them, because (a) they seem to work; (b) there's a long tradition there, and there are worse things in life than intertia and institutional conservatism; and (c) lots of other Anglicans do think that they are jure divino, and there is no harm in going along with them.

(There is harm in that partisan opinion, and all the stuff about apostolic succession, being mistaken for Anglican orthodoxy, which it is not: that kind of thing lies behind the pernicious and sectarian language of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which virtually unchurches non-episcopal Christians. Even Richard Hooker would have balked at that. But that's another post.)

Still, even if you think bishops are jure divino, 'bishop' is a capacious word and has been used to describe very many things, from urban church leaders to grand ecclesiastical princes, and that today's Anglican bishops are very different in the nature of their authority and ministry from most of their predecessors. I wonder if those differences might be worth exploiting a little.

The reason so many of those who oppose women's ministry find women bishops intolerable is that they cannot ignore or evade episcopal authority - not completely, anyway. And that is because we are wedded to the notion not just of episcopacy, but of geographically contiguous, uniform and exclusive episcopacy.

This is, frankly, a little weird. To take the analogy of parishes: I like the parish system very much, but we also have to recognise that geographical parishes are now overlaid by what you might call metaparochial structures, in which church communities are assembled from people residing across a wide area. So it is, and so, probably, it should be. We choose our parochial ministers, from the menu of those available in a particular area.

Why shouldn't individual churches be able to do the same with their bishops? This isn't just about gender. The Church of England's episcopate includes plenty of towering spiritual leaders, but they're a pretty funny cross-section of the Church. Mostly liberal Catholics and liberal Evangelicals, on the grounds that those are the people who find it easiest to be on speaking terms with everyone. Very few conservative Catholics; no conservative Evangelicals at all, which, as the representatives of that constituency keep saying, is a little odd. I know conservative Evangelicals are widely regarded as not properly housetrained, but that kind of distaste is no reason for keeping them out.

What I'd like to see is a set of super-dioceses, say eight of them, in each of which there were about five collaborating bishops: they'd have to recognise one another's legal authority, but they would be free to despise one another as long as they made the institutions work. And the parishes could choose who to look to, rather than chafing under a regime which they found disagreeable, as plenty do now. A commitment to having at least one bishop of each gender in each grouping would be easy.

But then I'd also say that the leadership of those groups should be collegial, with perhaps one of them elected by his or her peers as temporary archbishop (where does it say in Scripture that archiepiscopal office is indelible?) - and my underlying Presbyterian agenda comes out.

Going dangerously off-message

Holding a session with prospective PhD students today on how to prepare a research proposal, I was emphasising that, rather than proposing simply filling in gaps in our knowledge, they should promise a radical new perspective on the subject.

And so I found myself saying that, instead of just another brick in the wall, they should offer a view of the dark side of the moon.

My schoolfriend Tristan Burn would have been honoured. The trouble was, I found myself wondering, how many more Pink Floyd album titles could I drop into the discussion? 'The Final Cut' would have been easy enough, when we're talking about editing. 'A Momentary Lapse of Reason' not much more difficult. 'Animals' - trickier, but a single word is usually easy. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn', well, maybe not. Sadly, of course, the moment slipped by. But I think I did successfully date myself in front of a group of students.

A-level revolution?

On Friday last week, I did possibly the most worthwhile day's work I've ever done. Pearson, the publishing empire which (amongst many other things) run the UK examining board Edexcel, asked me to be one of 12 academics in Theology / Religious Studies to advise them on the outlines of the new RS A-level, the school-leaving exam for English 18-year-olds. (Why me, I have no idea, but it didn't seem worth arguing.)

I trogged along with a certain ho-hum sense, and found myself instead in an almost revolutionary conversation.

Of course academics have been grousing about A-levels for years. We've been complaining that they leave students incredibly highly trained to perform very tightly defined tasks to an extremely high standard, but that as soon as they're asked to deal with something unexpected, to show any independence or intellectual initiative, or to tackle primary texts which aren't pre-digested for them, they flounder. And we also complain that they can't write coherent or correct English, and when they do they can't communicate effectively or construct any kind of sustained argument.

In short, we want A-levels to train students to think; to read; and to write. None of which are in any sense easy skills, it should be said.

So we unleashed a wave of pent-up complaints at the poor folks from Pearson. And they took it. They told us that virtually every other subject area had told them the same thing (apparently Maths aren't so fussed about good English usage). And they gave every possible indication that the new, reformed A-levels would very seriously incorporate these concerns. I came away with a spring in my step, believing that we had made progress into a brave new world - and putting some real intellectual heft into an exam that 30,000 kids sit every year seems like a good day's work to me.

Plus I banged out 5000 words of stuff about Calvinism on the train. Don't get days like that very often.

Breaking the logjam

After that last post on women bishops, how could I not recommend this petition, which seems to me one of the few practical ways of tackling this question (and also the constitutional sclerosis) that I've seen?

If it's actually not practical, I'm sure someone will tell me ...

The women bishops disaster

Well, surprise, anger, despair, bafflement, a suffocating blanket of why-did-I-expect-anything-else, on this subject. I was lifted out of this last night, shortly after the news came through, watching two small boys blowing up each other's Lego models. Who could watch that and not think that spiritual leadership is a distinctively male quality?

But then, I'm a scarcely-repentant Protestant who doesn't really believe in bishops at all. So what do I know. Two slightly more considered thoughts.

One: this is certainly a disaster, but it's primarily a constitutional disaster - the product of a deeply obscure and dysfunctional decision-making process in the Church of England. It's not so much the supermajority requirement - something that pushes us to consensus is not a bad thing. But making it impossible to revisit a deeply urgent issue for five years is simply ridiculous: this needs to be resolved. And it also brings out how problematic the House of Laity is. This is a very indirectly elected body, and I believe relatively few of the candidates make their positions on the key issues plain to the electors. This isn't democracy in action; it's not clear that the lay representatives actually represent anyone, no matter the fine personal qualities of the individuals. If this fiasco exposes the essential illegitimacy of the body and of the process, then it's achieved something.

Two: we do, as a Church, actually deserve this. The bitterness, lack of goodwill and hairsplitting failures of generosity with which the debate has been conducted on both sides - including by me - has not been a model of Christian decisionmaking. A little repentance all round would not go amiss at this point. It might make the resolution of the issue a touch easier too.

Impossible history

Yesterday I had the unusual experience of leading a 90-minute class on the use of historical theory for theologians, and then going to preach on the connection between history and faith at evensong at University College. That double perspective and the discussions that resulted crystallised some old problems for me.

There was a lot of talk about how history (that is, modern, academic history, wearing its 19th-century rationalist garb) deals with miracles. The tendency is to assume that history is basically secularising. Leigh Eric Schmidt's wonderful history of American revivalism, Hearing Things, describes academic history as approaching the sacred with 'narratives of suspicion'.

That's obviously true, but I now wonder if it's both less sinister and less problematic than it appears. Because what strikes me now is that history deals exclusively in probabilities: nothing is ever proved or disproved categorically. But a miracle could almost be defined as an event whose probability can't be assessed.

On one level, you need to make an a priori decision whether miracles are possible at all. If no, then you are left with the Sherlock Holmes principle: eliminate the impossible, and whatever's left, however improbable, must be the truth. Which, as the late great Douglas Adams pointed out, is ever so slightly silly. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks."

But more than that, even if you grant that miracles are possible, how on earth can you assess their probability? A miracle is by definition an exceptional event, even a unique one, which defies patterns. It's neither probable or improbable: either it's impossible or it's inevitable.

So history isn't hostile as such to miracle-claims: it simply can't process them. They're outside its scope. And fair enough. The trick is to remember that, when there is something about which we cannot speak, it is sometimes prudent to keep silent.