One comment I feel is worth making concerns the near universal condemnation of the Church of England for Tuesday’s synod vote. It is simply to note that 100 years ago the same level of condemnation would have been attracted by the opposite outcome. We like to think that we have made progress in the last 100 years and that our current views are more correct.

I hope that is true. But what is certainly true is that the majority of the people who are outraged today would have been just as outraged if they had grown up 100 years earlier and witnessed the opposite synod outcome. Humanity has not changed that much in such a short time. What has changed is the moral zeitgeist – the thinking of the age. I believe it has changed for the better. But that is not the standard by which the Church is being measured. Quite simply, the Church does not stand condemned because it is morally in the wrong (although I suspect it is). It stands condemned because it is out of sync with the zeitgeist. The two of these are being confused.

This has always happened – witness any great moral move in history which we now regret. The reformation martyrs particularly spring to mind. They were greeted with such great moral approbation that they were burned at the stake. Today we recognise that the powers which were in the majority – who were so certain of their moral superiority that they were willing to kill for it – were wrong. I hope we are right in our modern thinking about equality and fairness, but we are not right simply by virtue of the fact that most people think this way.

Where does this leave us? It is clear that the majority of the Church of England believes that women should be eligible for all orders of ministry. We will certainly eventually see women in the episcopate. But, as it turns out, we are stuck in a place where we still have work to do.  Let us strive, in this work, to reach the point where we are motivated not by the zeitgeist, but by what is right. And, in so doing, perhaps we will find a few things to teach the world. Most particularly, we will hopefully learn what is needed to ensure that the fairness in the current spirit of the age solidifies and is not swept away by the next wind of political change.