A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Behind the passing conflicts of the moment lies a debate throughout Christianity about whether the Bible and Christian tradition can be wrong and can be changed. It is also a debate about whether God’s plan for the world centres on the supremacy of heterosexual men. ‘Male headship’ is one of the overriding concerns of the Sydney variant on Anglicanism, and worldwide, those Anglicans opposed to any change on attitudes to same-sex relationships overlap fairly snugly with those opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood or consecration to the episcopate, who use the same sort of arguments. Because of the fundamental nature of this debate, conservative Christians who look coldly on the style of ecumenism parented by twentieth-century liberal Protestantism, and who are frequently deeply suspicious of the World Council of Churches, will make some religious alliances which a century ago would have been unthinkable. So Moscow and Rome are at one in their attitudes to such questions as homosexuality and the ordination of women. Equally, when conservative Episcopalians met in a Dallas hotel conference centre to discuss their future after the Robinson consecration in 2003, these members of a heretical Protestant sect, the