Richard Holloway and the limits of Anglicanism

Sunday, 7 June 2009
Geoffrey Kirk
posted at The Ugley Vicar

Just when you thought it was safe…Richard Holloway is back! The white hope of the Loughborough Conferences, founder member of Affirming Catholicism and former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church has come a long way. The campaigner for women’s ordination who once described opponents as ‘seeking to sweep back the tide of God’ has now taken leave of the deity to whom he once appealed. Holloway no longer believes in God – but he continues to function as a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church, celebrating the sacraments and preaching the word (not, of course of God; but presumably of …Richard Holloway).

Like Jack Spong before him, Holloway is making a splash on the lecture circuit. ‘A bishop rethinks…’ ‘Agnostic bishop challenges churchmen…’

However offensive it may be to the rest of us, Holloway has grasped that there is money to be made from being an unbelieving prelate; a notoriety not readily available to a private individual. Richard Holloway ‘the Voltaire of Morningside’ would be nowhere near as marketable a commodity as an atheistical bishop of the Episcopal Church. And so he hangs on to the mitre he once cast into the Thames; to the eternal shame of the Church to which he belongs. the rest