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David Jenkins, who died on Sunday, is remembered as an unbelieving bishop, an ultra-liberal who dismissed the resurrection as a ‘conjuring trick with bones’. Only he never said that, and he was far from being an unbeliever. I got to know him in the late 1980s, when I made a film about him for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½, observing him going about his diocese, having time out on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and visiting the pilgrim sites associated with Jesus in Jerusalem.

I found him quite a shy man, who had found his true self as a theologian and a teacher. After a rough ride from the media he was naturally suspicious of me and the film crew, but he gradually warmed to us, and was good company. There was nothing he loved more than an argument – it brought him to life. So he tended to treat people as though they were Oxford undergraduates expecting them to give as good as they got. I remember how he ticked off a woman in a live radio-phone in telling her, ‘Madam, you have a mediaeval mind’. Not exactly polite or pastoral, but inviting a sharp riposte which he got, and he giggled at. I filmed him taking a confirmation in a parish with a long evangelical tradition. He was brilliant at tuning in to the atmosphere and undermining any assumptions people might have had about his theology. He produced an off-the-cuff sermon with three alliterated headings, calling on everyone to repent, believe and follow Jesus. When my film was launched there was a huge turn out of journalists expecting him to say something devastating. But the whole thing was a disaster because my film portrayed him, truthfully I think, as a provocative but entirely faithful Christian and the media quickly realised that there was nothing here for them and we got hardly any reviews. ‘Bishop believes in God and Jesus’ simply isn’t newsworthy.

These days neither the media not the Church are very interested in provoking theological debate. The Anglican Church has sometimes been described, perhaps unfairly, as the bland leading the bland. Quarrels about sex have replaced the great debates about the meaning of the Creed and we, and society, are poorer, I think, for the loss of engagement with the ultimate claims of faith.

What David Jenkins recognised is that we sometimes need to be shocked out of habit and complacency to find out what we truly believe. In this he was following the Western philosophical tradition that comes down to us from Socrates and Plato. But he was also being true to Jesus, who constantly shocked and upset people by his teaching, provoking them by wild exaggeration, parody and satire. Many found this unforgiveable as he knew they would. But for others it was liberation. When I think of David Jenkins the text comes to mind, ‘The servant is not greater than the Master’. But I have no doubt it was the master he followed.

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