An Anatomy of Error IV

Continuing as promised, I recommend to our readers the April 2003 portion of the Anatomy of error series that ran in New Directions. here is an excerpt:

There are, of course, enormous problems about how these biblical insights are to be applied and lived out in modern post-Enlightenment society. But there ought not, in our view, to be any dispute about the fact that they are incompatible with – indeed opposed to – the doctrinaire egalitarianism which is often espoused by the supporters of women priests. That egalitarianism is both arrogant and heavy-handed – arrogant because it fails to take account of the simple fact that all previously recorded societies have been patriarchal, and that they have accorded differential roles to women and men; heavy-handed because it lacks all subtlety and nuance in response to the human condition, indiscriminately condemning as ‘sexist’ or sinful whole swathes of activity from fairy stories to pornography.