The real Bishop Colenso.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Despite Chris McGillion's "research" (July-August 2005), "South African Evangelicals" did not split from the "official South African Church" in 1870. John William Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal, was deposed for "heresy" in 1863 by Archbishop Gray of Capetown. Colenso successfully appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and he remained the lawful Bishop of Natal. However, in 1866 Gray (now head of an autonomous Church of South Africa) excommunicated Colenso and in 1869 consecrated Macrorie as a rival "Bishop of Maritzburg".

In the early twentieth century the schism was gradually healed, and the remaining Colenso churches came to be incorporated in the South African Church. In the modern Pietermaritzburg Cathedral today, both bishops are honoured. Chris McGillion has only repeated a mistaken understanding common in Sydney and South Africa.

In the twentieth century, an evangelical "Church of England in South Africa" developed, supported by the Sydney diocese, but out of communion with Canterbury, and like Sydney, tending to move further away from the Anglican "centre". That church really has no links with Colenso's Church of England in Natal.

More than that: Bishop Colenso and the Diocese of Sydney could hardly be further apart! Colenso's fine biblical scholarship (of a kind now widely accepted) had him condemned as a heretic. An eirenic broad churchman, on biblical grounds almost a unitarian Anglican, he was far ahead of his day. He would still be anathema in my sadly doctrinaire and intolerant diocese. He carefully studied Zulu language and culture, and translated English works into Zulu. But he and his wife Frances and daughters were ...