Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a clergyman. He decided he was going to devote his life to God when he was in his early teens, but he never served as a parish priest.

At the age of 60, however, he found himself catapulted into the controversies which pastoral

responsibilities can bring.

When, after a career spent mainly as an academic theologian, he was appointed to one of the

Church's most important bishoprics.

His views on the Virgin Birth and the resurrection caused outrage, while his opinions on

current issues, particularly the divisions between rich and poor, infuriated politicians.

He remained steadfast through the storms, insisting as he still does that he is a man of God

committed utterly to his faith. He is the right

Reverend David Jenkins, the Lord Bishop of Durham. You certainly, Bishop came

late to public controversy. Was that a great shock to the system when it happened?

It was a shock because the way I came to controversy was simply by bringing before people what, as it were, everybody in the

theological colleges, the theological faculties and most of the trained ministry of most of the churches

throughout the world knew.

And so I thought I was just coming clean about where we were.

So you basically were just giving a public airing to something that had had private earrings hundreds of times to your knowledge?

That's right. And it came about in the first place on a television program when I was actually

laid on to explain how nowadays one believed the old

traditional doctrine of Jesus being God among us, you see, and I did so, but I needed to tidy

...