Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.
One of the things that struck me forcibly during the February 2023 debate on Living in Love and Faith at General Synod was the repeated reference to the ‘doctrine of marriage’, as though this was a constant and fixed set of ideas throughout time. In the debate, only Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes challenged this assumption.[1] Another striking theme, for the more punitively minded, was how bishops might be disciplined for their apparent departure from orthodoxy.
All this was a response to the modest proposals brought to Synod by the House of Bishops, proposals emerging out of the six-year long Living in Love and Faith process. The bishops maintain that their proposals do not alter the ‘doctrine of marriage’. Marriage remains, in the words of canon B30, ‘a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman’. (Elephant in the Room Warning: except when it isn’t ‘permanent and lifelong’ – but we are steadfastly refusing to talk about that.) Opponents, however, challenge this claim from the bishops.
I found myself feeling a bit sorry for the bishops as a group: from my ten years on the Crown Nominations Commission, I know the great emphasis we as a Church place on ‘Leadership’. Yet when bishops exercise even a smidgen, all hell breaks loose. Do we want our chief pastors to develop their thinking based on theological reflection and pastoral encounter and then exercise some ‘Leadership’ about it, or not?
As with most things, we’ve been here before.
Edward Lee Hicks (1843-1919) was Bishop of Lincoln from 1910 to his death in 1919. He is not a well-known figure in Anglican history. Hicks had the misfortune to follow Bishop Edward King – a figure of such devotion in certain traditions of the Church of England that he has a day in the calendar (8 March). In addition to his legendary pastoral devotion to his diocese, especially to the rural poor, King may have been the first Church of England bishop openly to wear a mitre since the Reformation – yes, a mitre! – a pretty commonplace practice now even amongst some of the most evangelical on the episcopal bench, such as the Bishop of Lancaster and the former Bishop of Blackburn. In the late nineteenth century, however, wearing a mitre was a Massive Thing, and at the instigation of the Church Association (an ancestor of the Church Society), King was prosecuted for all manner of now-unexceptional Anglican liturgical practices, such as lighting candles in daylight and making the sign of the cross at the blessing. The statue honouring King in Lincoln Cathedral celebrates his transgressive liturgical behaviour rather gleefully.
Hicks was also transgressive in his thinking but about something – and here I speak as a good High Church woman – considerably more important than tat. He was a member of the Commission in the early twentieth century revising the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which in the end became the 1928 ‘deposited’ Prayer Book. Parliament, as readers of this blog no doubt know, refused to approve the book, causing a Church/State crisis that was still talked about in wounded tones when I arrived in England as a graduate student in 1979. Nonetheless, from the late 1920s onwards, the revised book was probably used more in the public worship of the Established Church than the 1662, in an impressive collective act of episcopally-sanctioned grassroots passive resistance throughout the Church of England.
Hicks was committed to equality for women and in 1912 became president of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, a group working to put laywomen on the same footing as laymen in Church councils. Over many years on the Commission to revise the Book of Common Prayer he worked to have the word ‘obey’ removed from the marriage service and replaced with equal vows for the couple – as Common Worship does. He argued further for the use of 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings in place of Ephesians 5 to avoid any suggestion that the wife is not her husband’s equal. An unscientific sample (that is, my own 30+ years of officiating at marriages – oops – Holy Matrimony[2]), 1 Corinthians 13 is very popular – I’ve never had a request for Ephesians 5. In the end, Hicks got his reform – his change in the ‘doctrine of marriage’ – with the option to have equal vows included in the 1928 Prayer Book provision. Needless to say, no woman would be forced not to vow to obey. I hope that the irony of that last sentence is not lost on anyone.
Change, as we are seeing with LLF, is incremental in the life of the Church. The 1928 Prayer Book made no provision for the exchange of two rings – another liturgical expression of the equality of the couple and included the ‘giving away’ of the bride – both changes in Common Worship. I have spent some time trying to track down when two rings become the norm in England but have failed – there is a Master’s thesis topic waiting for someone! Despite neither the English or American 1928 Prayer Books making provision for it, the doyen of mid-twentieth century Anglican liturgists, Massey Shepherd, suggested that exchanging two rings was becoming ‘frequent’ in the American Episcopal Church in the 1950s.[3]
Nothing exists in a vacuum, and it is important to place the ‘obey’ debate of the 1910-20s in its historic context alongside not only women’s wider political and educational rights, but their inclusion in new Church governance structures, such as Parochial Church Councils and the forerunner of the General Synod, the Church Assembly. Laywomen were excluded from these new bodies. The opponents to equal vows did not use the language of complementarianism but that of good old-fashioned inequality and subordinationism. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, vocal opposition to equal vows came largely from the Anglo-Catholic quarter, based on a clear assumption of the inequality of the sexes. Athelstan Riley told the Church’s National Assembly in 1930 that:
… in 1923 when the cry of equality between the sexes was at its height, a short measure was pressed putting husband and wife on an equal footing – a cruel and wicked act. There was and could be no equality in matters of sexual morality between men and women. It had pleased God to create a profound inequality; in temptation, in the results of sin to the individual [pregnancy out of wedlock?] … and eventually to society at large.[4]
It is good to be reminded what a new kid on the block complementarianism is in the gender debates.
Overshadowed by King, Hicks deserves to be better known. Most importantly for our current discussions of LGBT+ inclusion, the beginning of his theological change on the ‘doctrine of marriage’ had been brought about, in the best Anglican way, by pastoral encounter: a young couple, whose marriage he was to solemnize, requested the omission of ‘obey’ and that the bride not be ‘given away’ by her father. Hicks’ diary records his puzzlement at the request, but it clearly started him thinking. The year, dear reader, was 1914.[5]
In the early 20th century, an Anglican bishop was promoting the view that marriage – or Holy Matrimony as we now apparently must call it – was a union of equals and he managed to move the needle in terms of the Church’s expression of doctrine in its public liturgy. How many members of the General Synod realize what a departure from the 1662 Prayer Book’s ‘doctrine of marriage’, equal vows, not being ‘given away’, and the exchange of two rings, expresses? Heaven forbid, that pastoral encounter should be divorced (I choose that word deliberately) from the shaping of doctrine and pastoral practice.