Richard Coekin’s license (Part iii)
This comment from a CHN reader:
It's worse than you've made it seem. In the introduction to the report, the Bishop of Winchester disallows extraneous issues from both sides (complaints against liberal theology by Richard Coekin, complaints about church planting by Bishop Butler). The report concludes in this narrow field, that Bishop Butler failed to administer justice. But it recommends a condition for the restoration of the license: that Richard Coekin submit to Bishop Butler concerning church planting. So a disallowed issue is reintroduced against the victim of injustice. Thankfully the Archbishop of Canterbury removed these conditions.
The reader is quite right. It wasn't just that the report failed to deal with the real issues. It actually attempted to satisfy Bishop Butler's complaint without a fair and complete hearing.
In fact, if the Bishop of Winchester had had his way, Bishop Butler would perhaps have had more power after the decision than before over what Richard Coekin could and couldn't do in the realm of church planting. Yet the Bishop of Winchester had expressly said that he refused to consider the church planting issue.
Perhaps Bishop Butler isn't the only Church of England Bishop who needs to learn some principles of justice and fairness.