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A Heart in my Head: A biography of Richard Harries by John S. Peart-Binns

Between faith and the world: John Whale on the life of a distinguished and outspoken bishop

richardharries
“Brave”: the Rt Revd Lord Harries, formerly Bishop of Oxford

Continuum £20
(978-0-8264-8154-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18

NO DIOCESAN BISHOP with a national ministry could have been better trained or placed. Army family and upbringing, making for self-discipline in the use of time; higher learning under great men; long curacy where a professional-class congregation wanted the gospel intelligently commended; brief retreat to theological-college teaching and reading; incumbency in a parish ripe for growth; recurrent invitations to talk on the radio, which developed both a gift for speaking a script and a national name; light-duties academic work in London, allowing varied Christian activism at high levels; and a diocese where area bishops already carried much of the load.

That translates, for Richard Harries, into having been a school-boy at Wellington; an officer cadet at Sandhurst, and a subaltern for three years in the Royal Signals (the corps in which his father had been a regular); an ordinand at Selwyn under Owen Chadwick, and then at Cuddesdon under Robert Runcie; a curate at Hampstead Parish Church for six years from 1963; tutor at Wells, in Tom Baker’s time; Vicar of All Saints’, Fulham, for nine years from 1972, during which the steady broadcasting began; Dean of King’s College, London; and Bishop of Oxford from 1987 till his retirement at 70 last June.

It is the story told by John S. Peart-Binns, whose 13th biography of a bishop this is, and who seems to share his subject’s broad centre-left stance. He has read Harries’s work, interviewed him, elicited written and spoken thoughts from his friends and old colleagues. The striking thing that emerges is the variety of topics, national and international, that Harries has been prepared to discuss in public and in reasonable detail. During his King’s and early Oxford periods, he wrote or spoke about bio-ethics, Latin American liberation theology, South Africa, weapons in space, Northern Ireland, legislation on sexual offences, nuclear deterrence, and Christian relations with both Judaism and Islam.

In the Lords, where he has been active since 1994 and now speaks as a life peer, he has added divorce law, mental illness, housing associations, penal policy, detention for asylum-seekers, the National Lottery, the Iraq war, reform of the Lords itself, global terrorism, stem-cell research, human fertility, and euthanasia. “I seek to operate”, he tells Peart-Binns, “on the borderlands between the Christian faith and the world.”

Peart-Binns is at pains, he him-self writes, “to probe a personality which does not probe itself”. His most perceptive piece of evidence comes from an old friend of Harries’s, Julia Neuberger. She agrees that Harries is not given to self-analysis, and she makes gentle fun of him, but she ends by crowning him with an affectionate garland of adjectives: “brave, fearless, warm, tough on himself, of great integrity, emotionally needier than he thinks he is, extremely clever, agile physically and mentally, versatile in his talents and interests, spiritually very aware”.

Warm: that is not how he has always been seen. At first encounter a number of people in the diocese reportedly found him cool or aloof. But the warmth showed in more important ways. His area bishops testify that he never undermined them. He knew that loyalty is a two-way virtue.

That makes all the more surprising the first of his two reverses in his Oxford years. When, in 1990, he went to law with the Church Commissioners, the Church of England’s money managers, hoping to make them disinvest from a still apartheid-ridden South Africa, he was attacking his own side. Titularly and ex officio he was a Commissioner himself. Peart-Binns here turns frankly partisan: he has the Commissioners “bleating” and “shedding crocodile tears”. In fact they had already disinvested a good deal; to do more, they argued, would be complicated, of doubtful effect, and inimical to their legal duty of maximising clergy salaries.

Harries wanted that last point declared invalid. His plea turned out to be ill got up; the High Court threw it out on the ground that the declarations his lawyers sought were too vaguely phrased to work. Peart-Binns’s argument that the case did at least increase the Commissioners’ ethical awareness will not wash. They were well aware before.

But Harries’s attempt was certainly brave. No other bishop stood with him. And the same bravery appears in his other notable failure, to get Jeffrey John made Area Bishop of Reading. When Harries nominated him in the summer of 2003 as being the best candidate, he knew that John was unrepentantly gay, though now celibate. Evan-gelicals in Reading and Oxford were dismayed; within three weeks they were buttressed by American Anglicans similarly minded over the election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. Harries nevertheless pressed on till Rowan Williams, himself in post only four months, withdrew the agreement to con-secrate John that Harries had at first secured. The plan collapsed.

David Winter, a friend of Harries’s and a senior cleric in Oxford diocese, comments for the book: “It was almost as though Richard felt that this was an issue that had to be faced, at whatever cost.” If that is indeed what Harries felt, he was right. Two principles needed establishing: that gays should be treated like everyone else, and that not everything in the Bible matters. The opportunity may not have been the right one; it seldom is; but it was the one Harries had, and he took it.

The book (its title comes from Beckett’s Endgame) is too long, too weighted with Peart-Binns’s own reflections. A few names are misspelt; more than a few indicative sentences end with that imprecise nudge, an exclamation mark; the index is incomplete. But Lord Harries is likely to be a notable voice in the Church of England for years yet. Fact and testimony were worth compiling.

John Whale is a former editor of the Church Times.

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