THE senior clergyman who nominated a gay priest as Bishop of Reading has claimed there is biblical authority for his decision.

Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, has declared there is no bar in the New Testament to the appointment of a gay bishop. “Jesus said nothing about homosexuality,” he says in an interview in today’s Sunday Times.

Harries contrasts the absence of a biblical prohibition on homosexuality with Jesus’s clear line against divorce. Despite this, he says, the Church of England has recently made provision for divorced people to be married in church, “even if their former spouse is still living”.

Harries said: “Gay and lesbian people find themselves the way they are, with God-given affections for people of the same sex. They do not conform to certain biblical texts, but God takes them and their love as it is and blesses it.”

Harries argues that a majority of Church of England bishops support Canon Jeffrey John, the bishop in waiting at the centre of the row. He goes further and says most bishops also have sympathy with John’s view — expressed from the pulpit — that the church should support all faithful same-sex relationships.

Harries’s tone of defiance will dismay evangelicals in his diocese. Philip Giddings, a friend of Harries but a leader of discontented evangelicals, wants John to stand down. He said the fact that Jesus did not mention homosexuality did not mean he approved of it. “Jesus didn’t say anything about fraud, for example. All references in scripture to homosexuality are negative.”

Giddings, who leads a group of about 80 clergy and 30 church lay representatives, is now waiting to hear whether they have secured a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to express their dismay directly.

“We are all down on our knees praying that the Lord will make clear to us what we should do next,” he added.

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