Priest

He was a bishop of the Church of England who did not believe in miracles, and he said so from the pulpit of his own cathedral. Not in private, not in a journal read by four men — in Birmingham, to his own diocese, repeatedly, for twenty-nine years. He rejected the physical resurrection of the body. He denied that the bread and wine of communion become anything at all. He preached that Darwin was correct and that Genesis was not history, at a time when much of his church was still negotiating with that idea. Clergy under his authority refused to receive him. The Archbishop of Canterbury publicly rebuked him in the House of Lords. The Convocation of Canterbury moved against him. He did not resign, and he did not stop.

The nickname was "the Gorilla Bishop," and it was not affectionate. He gave sermons on human evolution in Westminster Abbey that made national newspapers. He described the elaborate ritual practices of the High Church wing as magic and superstition, and refused to license priests who taught them, which meant a running civil war inside his own diocese for three decades. He was a pacifist — through the First World War, when that was near-treasonous, and through the Second, when it was worse, and he opposed the atomic bomb from the moment it existed. He wrote a book in his seventies arguing that the historical Jesus could not be reconstructed from the Gospels and that the miraculous elements were later accretions. His own bishops asked him to withdraw it or resign. He withdrew nothing, resigned nothing, and simply outlasted them.

None of it came from doubt. It came from mathematics. Before he was a clergyman he was a Cambridge mathematician — a Fellow of Trinity, a Fellow of the Royal Society, elected for original work on the theory of functions, with a mathematical function still named after him. He was trained to accept a proof and discard everything that failed one, and he was raised a Nonconformist teacher's son who had never learned to treat institutional authority as an argument. When he took orders he did not put the method down. He applied it to scripture and reported the results, and he could never afterwards understand why anyone found the procedure shocking.

He held Birmingham until 1953 and died a few months after retiring. The men who tried to remove him failed at every attempt. Most of what he was denounced for is now unremarkable in the Church that denounced him.

Forget the heresy trials and the rebukes and the thirty-year war. Remember only this: he stood between his people and the crowd that wanted them corrected, alone, in public, for a working lifetime — and no one ever moved him off the spot.