Only two weeks earlier, the primates of the Anglican world served notice on the bishops of the American church that they must disavow same-sex marriage or be expelled from the communion.

The Canadian Anglican church is to decide the issue in June.

If the church rejects gay marriage, Ingham will no doubt be expected to recant or resign.

Christianity needs "a better understanding of the complex role sexuality plays in our human nature, and of the purposes of God in creating us as sexual beings," says the bishop, because the teaching of both the Bible and the church have been shaped through the lens of male experience.

As an ex-Anglican, I find this crisis over the acceptability homosexual practice, which threatens to divide Anglicanism in much of the western world, as so bizarre it defeats understanding.

The Anglican church has been divided before, of course.

The issue over which it split from Rome in the 16th century concerned the nature of the church itself, and how Christ wanted it to be governed. The issue that split the Calvinist Presbyterians from the Anglican Church in the 17th century was the nature of redemption and salvation.

The issue that split the Methodists from the Anglican Church in the 18th century was the capacity of the individual to adequately interpret the Bible for himself, and the necessity of an apostolic succession of bishops.

All these divisions were certainly unfortunate, but nonetheless concerned matters which could scarcely be dismissed as frivolous.

But what is the issue over which Bishop Ingham and those who think like him are prepared to forfeit their church's unity?

It is the issue of sodomy, whether the sexual proclivities of something like one or two percent of the human race should be enshrined by Christians as acceptable or even, indeed, desirable. To assert this principle, they are prepared to wreck their church.

The mind reels.

Moreover, rooted in the bishop's declaration is the assumption that we of the late 20th and early 21st century have discovered things about sex that Christians in the past didn't know. Just what those things are, he doesn't say, but it's worth asking.

Did the early Christians not know that some people had a sexual desire for persons of the same sex?

As a matter of fact, they knew all about it, because many of them lived in a society that fully approved of it. Did they not know about sex outside marriage? They did indeed. Did they not know about abortion? They certainly did and the people around them widely practised it. So what are the sexual things that we know and they didn't know?

The answer is we know nothing they didn't know. Then why should the church change its teaching?

Though the bishop doesn't say, we know his real reason. It's because society itself has changed.

Society has reverted to the sexual standards of the pagan world, and the bishop wants the church to revert along with it. The church must adopt new attitudes towards sex, he says, by which he means the old pagan attitudes.

To the Christians, sexual activity is confined within marriage, and marriage in the view of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer has three purposes: 1. "For the hallowing of the union betwixt man and woman." (Sex in itself, that is, quite apart from producing children, is to be regarded as a "hallowed" act.) 2. For procreation of children. 3. "For the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, in both prosperity and adversity."

This is the teaching the bishop wants to scrap.

How different were the bishops who actually converted the pagan world. They saw the church as setting an example for the world to follow.

Bishop Ingham sees the world as setting an example for the church to follow. Small wonder the world shows so little interest in such a church.

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