The Bold, Bad Bishop

For 29 years the Rt. Rev. Ernest William Barnes, bishop of Birmingham, has been the Church of England's foremost champion of religious heterodoxy. A mathematician in his youth, he has spent most of his life in holy orders, trying, as he put it, to make the beliefs of the Christian religion "come to terms with science and scholarship." For Bishop Barnes, this involved repudiating the virgin birth of Christ ("a crude, semipagan story"), the existence of Adam and Eve, and such biblical accounts as Jonah and the whale and Noah's ark. He does not believe in miracles--whether current or biblical.

On the positive side, in his crusade for "honest religion," he has advocated euthanasia, rigorous, scientific birth control, and sterilization of the unfit as a means of keeping the population manageable.

Although the Anglican Church is a tolerant communion, such proposals, coming from a consecrated bishop, were a little hard for orthodox churchmen to take. In 1947, after Bishop Barnes had published The Rise of Christianity, a book expounding his unorthodox views, the archbishop of Canterbury declared: "If his views were mine, I should not feel that I could still hold episcopal office in the church."

Bishop Barnes, who liked to call himself "the bold, bad bishop," ignored this thinly veiled summons to resign. The archbishop, who has only limited power over British bishops, did not attempt to remove him. But orthodox churchmen kept tossing brickbats in Bishop Barnes's direction, and at church convocations he took to vesting himself outside the regular bishops' robing room, so warm was the disapproval of his colleagues.

Last week, five years after the archbishop's summons, Bishop Barnes, 78, announced that he would resign his office in May and retire with his wife to the country. His reason: ill health.

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