The Right Reverend David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, has died. You can read some sympathetic obituaries here and here.
Dr David Jenkins was the Bishop of Durham when I was an undergraduate at university over thirty years ago, and he certainly succeeded in his ambition to get people to talk about religion in pubs and elsewhere. Both then and now I remain completely sure that he was wrong, very wrong, in his approach to dogmatic theology.
His much quoted statement about the Virgin Birth, namely: “I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange a virgin birth if He wanted, but I very much doubt if He would”, still strikes me as not just mistaken, but shallow. God does not “arrange” things the way we human beings do. He has a plan that springs from His eternal wisdom. What He plans is complete and entire, and every part of that plan means something. To see the Virgin Birth as some sort of afterthought or extra, as something contingent not necessary, is to miss the point about the nature of God and what His revelation entails.
