Farewell Rowan Williams

Posted on March 21, 2012 
Filed under Opinion

ACL President Mark Thompson offers these thoughts on the legacy of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury –

“Rowan Williams has occupied Lambeth Palace at an extraordinarily difficult period in Anglican history.”

“It is now official that the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will resign at the end of this year. The news is not really a surprise. Rumours have abounded for the past year about an early retirement and return to academia. It is generally recognised that the last decade has been an extremely taxing time for Rowan Williams and the pressure upon him from all sides has been extreme.

Already a great number of valedictory notices have appeared on the net and in the church press. His intellectual prowess is universally acknowledged, even if it is often qualified with exasperation at his highly abstract way of communicating his ideas. He has been described in one recent piece as ‘the theologian’s theologian’, no doubt a reference to the fact that he has never been satisfied with easy answers and has preferred oblique approaches to thorny issues rather than a direct frontal assault. He has challenged his readers and others to deep thought and a refusal to foreclose on the answers. Perhaps too, it might be said, his difficult and abstract prose has had a particular appeal to those too ready to assume that the difficulty lies in the profundity of his ideas rather than an unwillingness to nail his colours to the mast, those who prefer asking questions to giving answers. And yet, it must also be said, there have been fleeting moments of remarkable lucidity in which he has confessed faith in Christ in the midst of uncertainty, suffering and brokenness. 

Those who know him personally (and I readily admit that I do not) speak of his personal warmth and a sense of genuine piety. He prays, he meditates upon the Scriptures and he seeks to model humble service and an openness to others. He has somewhat of the aura of the ancient mystic about him, underlined by his regular appeal to mystic writers such as John of the Cross and his commitment to an essentially apophatic approach to theological descriptions of the person and work of God.

His appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury was greeted with enthusiasm by some. A man of such intellectual stature was just what a troubled church needed at this time. Others could not believe that a man who had written as he had on matters of human sexuality and biblical interpretation would be endorsed as an appropriate leader for the Church of England, and by extension the Anglican Communion, at a time when precisely these issues stood at the centre of a crisis that seemed to be pushing Anglicanism to the brink. How could he function as a guardian of the truth when his academic work, apparently borne out of personal conviction, challenged, or at the very least appeared to challenge, the deposit of faith?

Rowan Williams has occupied Lambeth Palace at an extraordinarily difficult period in Anglican history. The only Lambeth Conference over which he will have presided was significantly undermined by a boycott of bishops who together represented way over half of the world’s Anglicans. The Anglican Communion is not what it was before he took office and it is doubtful whether it can ever be so again. The Global South bishops once spoke of the danger of tearing the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level and undoubtedly that is what has happened over the past ten years. The new realities, including GAFCON and the FCA, cannot simply be ignored.

Archbishop Williams has been attacked by the revisionists in America and elsewhere because they had believed he would further their cause in more direct ways than he has. Though he did invite to Lambeth 2008 Katherine Jefferts Schori and the other American bishops who elected and consecrated a practicing homosexual in 2003 (excluding only Gene Robinson himself), he refused to distance himself from Resolution 1.10 of Lambeth 1998. On the other hand he has been attacked by conservatives from the other side of the Anglican spectrum for including the Americans in the Lambeth invitations and because in his own rather confusing way he has in fact promoted the agenda of the revisionists. His Larkin-Stuart Lecture from 2006 is a masterly example of hermeneutical obfuscation, a sleight of hand that results in a biblical prohibition being transformed into, if not a biblical permission, then certainly something much less than a prohibition. His appeal to Romans 2 to mitigate the negative judgements of Romans 1 fails to recognise that the argument continues to the devastating conclusion of Romans 3:9–20. His appeal to John 13 to qualify in significant ways the exclusive claims of Jesus in John 14 does violence to the context of both statements and undermines contemporary missionary endeavour, the apostolic mission, and even the ministry of the Lord Jesus himself.

It is perhaps a little early to know how history will remember Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. Against all odds there are some who continue to revere him as a great and visionary leader. The continuing existence of the Anglican Communion is cited as evidence that he has done a good job in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Others have concluded he has been a severe and bitter disappointment, an archbishop whose refusal to make a stand for biblical truth further weakened an almost terminally ill network of churches.

It would be churlish to do anything but wish Rowan Williams well in his ‘life after Canterbury’. He can now indulge his love of literature, theological and otherwise, without the constraints of ecclesiastical responsibility. May he continue to stimulate thought and cause people to rush to the Scriptures ‘to see if these things are so’ (Acts 17:11). However, his tenure of office should serve to remind us of something we ought to have learned from the Scriptures already. Intellectual prowess is not enough when it comes to leading the people of God. We might be dazzled by a breadth of reading or a capacity to turn an eloquent phrase, we might stand in awe of accrued academic and literary honours. However, none of this guarantees faithfulness, clarity and boldness in the proclamation of God’s truth. God’s people, the disciples of Christ bought with his own blood, need more than cleverness and sometimes cleverness can actually get in the way. They need intellectual rigour submitted to the discipline of God’s word, insight that sees the theological answer to the challenges of the moment and a willingness to take a stand on what Scripture does in fact say.”

– First posted by Mark D Thompson at Theological Theology.