I enjoyed the headline to your letters page: "God must decide gay bishops issue" (July 2).

I wonder which side He will favour after all the advice he has been receiving of late; the fundamentalists/traditionalists or the innovators/liberals?

I have followed the debate about Jeffrey John's appointment as Bishop of Reading in both the national press and your newspaper, with a mixture of deep anger and amusement.

What Arron Freeman's letter (June 28) highlights is the stupidity of quoting the Bible without relating what one finds there to our changed situations and different standards.

Some points in the letters of Alan Nunn, John Webster (July 2) and Richard Szypulski (July 3) must not be allowed to pass unchallenged.

Although Mr Nunn is right to claim the belief system of Anglicanism is based on the Bible and other sources, he does not permit any sources after the 17th Century to be added to it.

In the tradition of the Western Church, there is no absolute commitment to ascertain the will of God solely from the Bible (as Mr Nunn admits).

If the promise of Christ is to "lead us into all truth", there is an implication all truth has not yet been revealed to us and God's revelation is an ongoing process.

It is for that reason that the Church has always permitted other sources of revelation, one of which is known as the "sensus fidelium", the developing opinions and experiences of ordinary Christians.

My main point of criticism is of Mr Nunn and Mr Szypulski in their wanting to keep alive the illusion of a unified Anglican Communion.

It is their belief consecrating Dr John would inflict horrendous damage on Anglicanism and result in "a parting of the ways" and a "fragmentation".

It is my conviction that the Anglican Communion is being held together by not dealing with important issues.

I am not willing to see the Church of England pay the high price of cancelling Dr John's ordination so that we can keep the Church stuck in the 17th Century or placate this Nigerian archbishop and so keep the Anglican Communion intact.

A schismatic Church with integrity is to be preferred to a Church whose history is littered with compromises and which is fast losing any credibility.

-Dr MBJ Johnson, Brighton