Rowan Williams

His legacy

Andrew Goddard

• Editorial: Lion Books
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745957623
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religious Biographies

Rowan Williams has served as Archbishop of Canterbury through one of the most turbulent periods in the history of global Anglicanism. He has also faced numerous challenges within the Church of England. How has he coped with the huge issues of a divided church and a rapidly changing world? What has he done as archbishop when parts of the church are campaigning for an inclusive church with gay-partnered clergy and women bishops, while others are determined to resist these developments? How has he related to other Christian traditions and those of other faiths? What has he said about the Iraq war, the financial crash, Sharia Law? In this fascinating assessment, Andrew Goddard surveys Archbishop Rowan's time in office. Goddard draws on Williams' speeches and writings, as well as interviews and comments from those who have worked with him. This book shows the pressures faced by an academic scholar who only took on this demanding role because he believed it to be God's call. What sort of leader has he been, and what sort of legacy does he leave for his successor, Justin Welby?

1

The Making of an Archbishop

On Thursday 23 July 2002 it was officially announced that Rowan Douglas Williams, the Archbishop of the Church in Wales, was to be the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. The news, by then, surprised no one, even though Rowan admitted that it was “still something of a shock to find myself here”. Ever since George Carey’s announcement in early January that he would be stepping down in October, Rowan’s name had been at the forefront of speculation. By the time of this formal confirmation it was the worst-kept secret in Christendom.

A consistent hallmark of almost all the profiles of Rowan Williams that appeared prior to his appointment is reference to his spirituality and acknowledgment of his personal relationship with, and transformation by, God. Mary Ann Sieghart wrote that “it is hard to describe what makes a man holy – a combination of wisdom, compassion, intelligence and humility perhaps – but it is not hard to see that Rowan Williams possesses the quality of holiness in abundance”. In addition to this, four other aspects of his story particularly shaped him and his subsequent pattern of ministry and legacy:

• he was not English and came from a non-English diocese with no experience of senior leadership in the Church of England;
• he was a world-renowned academic theologian, teacher, and intellectual;
• he was, partly because of his academic calling, associated with controversy;
• he was already a serving Primate of the Anglican Communion.

Rather than attempting a chronological account, what follows tells the story of Rowan’s formation up to his appointment through each of these four lenses.

A Bishop from Wales

Given the growing international role of the Archbishop of Canterbury, it was fitting that George Carey’s successor should not be English. Rowan was a permanent reminder to English Anglicans that they are no longer at the centre of Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion is not simply an ecclesial remnant of Britain’s imperial past.

Rowan Williams was born in Swansea in South Wales on 14 June 1950 (making him, at just fifty-two, much younger at appointment than any recent archbishop). His parents – Aneurin and Delphine – had married two years earlier and Rowan would be their only child. His early life was marked by ill health. In February 1952, he contracted a rare form of meningitis which left him with a limp and permanent deafness in his left ear. This, in the words of one friend, “is quite significant… if somebody lives with deafness from childhood they are not uninfluenced by that”. After his recovery, in 1953, the family moved to Cardiff and he began his formal education at Lamorna, a fee-paying primary school, before the family returned to Swansea in 1960 where he attended Dynevor Grammar School until 1968.

In Cardiff the family worshipped at Park End Chapel, a Presbyterian church, the first of many non-Anglican influences on the future archbishop. Rowan has often spoken warmly of the influence of the minister there, Geraint Nantlais Williams (the son of William Nantlais Williams, prominent during the Welsh Revival of 1904). His theological sympathies were less overtly evangelical than his famous father’s but lay with that tradition, and his preaching had a major impact on the young Rowan who would himself become a powerful preacher. He recalls his preaching was marked by “enormous fervour and intelligence” and this, together with the hymns and lessons, “made me feel, yes, there’s reality here”.¹

On returning to Swansea, Rowan quickly became captured by and committed to the Anglican worship, shaped by Prayer Book Catholicism, of his Church in Wales parish, All Saints, Oystermouth. This shift would be decisive, moving him into the more Anglo-Catholic tradition within Anglicanism with which he would remain identified. All Saints’ vicar, Eddie Hughes (incumbent, 1946–80) and curate Huw Thomas (from 1965 to 1968) were important influences on both the intellectual and spiritual formation of (in Rupert Shortt’s words) this “unusually churchy” youngster. Indeed, it appears, he was even described as a future Archbishop of Canterbury aged twelve. He was already displaying some of the characteristics that would draw comment during his archiepiscopacy: shy, quiet, academically brilliant and, as one teacher said, a lover of seclusion. His interest in history, politics, community service, and drama grew, and he developed his gifts as a poet and translator.

Rowan’s life and faith were, therefore, shaped by the culture and church of Wales, with little or no connection to English Anglicanism until he moved to study at Cambridge in 1968. Although for a time he seriously considered becoming a Roman Catholic and was strongly drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy, he committed himself to the Church of England, being ordained a deacon in 1977, after earlier exploring but deciding against becoming a monk. His training and ordained ministry in the Church of England were, however, very different from most Anglican clergy. He never trained as an ordinand in a theological college nor served a traditional curacy in a title parish. Instead he moved from teaching at one theological college – the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield – to being lecturer at another, Westcott House in Cambridge (1977–80) where he was ordained and served as chaplain. He gained parish experience as honorary curate at St George’s, Chesterton from 1980 to 1983 before becoming Dean of Clare College, Cambridge (1984–86).

In Cambridge, after an earlier broken engagement with a Lutheran ordinand, Rowan met Jane Paul, and they married in Bradford on 4 July 1981. A graduate at Clare College, studying theology, she would also become a gifted theologian, teacher, and writer. Born in India, she was one of five daughters of Geoffrey Paul, Bishop of Hull (1977–81) and then Bishop of Bradford until his death in 1983. Bishop Paul, associated with the more evangelical traditions of the Church of England, was a powerful influence and model for Rowan who described him as “one of the greatest Christians I have been privileged to know. He was not only a scholar and bishop of unusual stature, but a man who commanded love and loyalty in a rare degree, from the most diverse souls.”

Leaving Cambridge in 1986, Rowan spent the next six years in Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and as a canon of Christ Church. For the first fifteen years of his ordained ministry, therefore, his experience of the Church of England was focused on, though by no means restricted to, the Oxbridge interface between church and academy. Then, after nearly quarter of a century, he returned to his homeland and full-time episcopal ministry. In 1992 he became Bishop of Monmouth, the first of two dioceses created after the Church in Wales left the Church of England on disestablishment in 1920.

Rowan spent ten years as Bishop of Monmouth, also serving as Archbishop of Wales from 1999. A number of features of his ministry are worth noting for the insight they give. He quickly established himself as a respected chief pastor who, in the words of his successor, Dominic Walker, “was much loved in the diocese”,² committed to the care of his clergy and offering support in regular parish visits. Some, however, commented on the perhaps excessive time he devoted to those struggling and wished it could be given to other clergy. Questions were also raised about the wisdom of some of his choices and appointments (he tended to see the best in people even when there was contrary evidence that should have raised alarms). He was thought to be administratively challenged and generally eschewed ideas of strategic planning and management (although he did develop a process for local permanent deacons). Despite his consensual impulses, he was not a notable team player. Richard Tarran (diocesan secretary, 1995–2009), reflecting on his time with Rowan, said he had learnt “so much from him spiritually” but added that his successor “brought about significant and welcome changes in leadership styles which have become more inclusive”.

As bishop, Rowan was respected by Anglicans from across different traditions including the relatively small number of evangelicals. They particularly welcomed his concern for mission and evangelism (he was the only Welsh bishop to sponsor Good News in Wales) and his support for various initiatives in church planting and new forms of church. He had appointed Tudor Griffiths as diocesan missioner in 1995 because, in Rowan’s words to him, “evangelicals know what mission is”.³ When he asked Rowan whether he should concentrate on building on strength or addressing weaknesses in the diocese, Rowan thought a while and said, “It’s rather Thatcherite of me, I know, but I want you to concentrate on building strength.”⁴ The need to turn things around was clear. The diocese was in rapid numerical decline, with the job description for a new diocesan secretary in 2009 admitting that “church attendance has been in decline for many years and the statistics for Monmouth Diocese in the 1990s were depressing”. In 1999, Rowan established the training of evangelists to be licensed in the diocese and also commissioned a diocesan mission team to establish and lead certain mission initiatives. In November 1999, Bob and Mary Hopkins, recognized leaders in church-planting initiatives, spent ten days reviewing eleven missional initiatives Rowan had identified. They recall how “in two of the projects we reviewed we loved how Rowan was combining traditional forms with creative innovation in his formal recognition of two of the church plants as Orders – the Order of Jacobs Well and Living Proof”.⁵

Outside Monmouth, Rowan played a prominent role, including in contentious issues. In April 1993 he seconded the motion in favour of women priests in Wales. This was lost and so, despite his strong commitment to the cause, he refused invitations to preach at ordinations in England where women were being ordained from 1994. Despite his support for women’s ordination, when this was approved in 1997, he was then the strongest advocate among the bishops for episcopal provision for those opposed.

Demonstrating the wide esteem in which he was held, he was elected as Archbishop of Wales (a post not tied to a particular diocese but elected by the six bishops from among themselves) on 7 December 1999, at the end of a difficult year in which he suffered the death of both his parents within two weeks of each other.

As bishop, and then archbishop, Williams continued to write and to speak as a theologian. His remarkable gifting as a speaker and a lecturer – used to the full at Canterbury – is illustrated by a change that had to occur under his successor, Bishop Dominic Walker. After arriving he raised with the bishop’s secretary his concern about the need for more time for preparation, reasonably pointing out a coming week with three major speaking engagements and no time set aside to prepare for them. The response was, “We’re not really used to that. What we’re used to is Rowan going out of the door saying, ‘Just what was the title of the lecture I’m going to give?’”

By the time the vacancy at Canterbury was announced, Rowan had thus served for nearly ten years as a diocesan bishop but his experience was very different from someone with that level of episcopal experience within the Church of England. The Church in Wales is a small church, with bishops and the national church having limited administrative support staff, certainly nothing comparable to either Church House or the Lambeth Palace staff. The administrative burden on bishops was also small compared to almost all English dioceses, allowing more time for the hands-on pastoral ministry which Rowan enjoyed. Asked eighteen months in about the new job he tellingly commented that a key difference from Wales was, “moving from a context where the basic stuff, day by day and week by week, was pastoral work in the parishes of the diocese to a situation where that’s not the primary thing, in terms of time consumption, anyway”. Such a transition would not have been as stark for most English diocesans. The Church in Wales is also intimate and familial so the clergy and many leading lay people know practically everyone else in the church’s leadership across the divisions of geography and churchmanship.

Appointing someone with no experience as a bishop in England was a major innovation which raised potential problems. In his relatively few comments about the vacancy, Rowan explicitly drew attention to some of these: “It would be extremely unusual for the Crown to look beyond the ranks of English bishops, given the need to understand the workings of the Church of England, the House of Lords and so on.”

There was, then, to be a steep learning curve on appointment to Canterbury, and his inexperience may have helped create the major Reading crisis that engulfed him within his first year. His non-English upbringing and ecclesial experience remained a cause of concern among those for whom the distinctively English character of the church is of great importance. Tom Sutcliffe, reflecting on Rowan’s time in office, said:

His biggest failing has been his poorly communicated and perhaps inarticulate vision of what he senses really matters about the Church of England as an English institution. Anglicanism in its English heartland is as much our national heritage as Shakespeare… There was never before an Archbishop of Canterbury who seemed not to believe in that in his bones and in his heart. But Rowan is a Welshman and an intellectual, and believes in the Church of England as merely a part of a much larger historical accident.⁶

Or, even more importantly, Rowan is simply first and foremost a catholic Christian who believes, in “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” rather than any particular national church.

An Academic Theologian and Intellectual

The period just described was also marked by Rowan establishing his reputation as an academic. He initially left Wales in 1968 for Cambridge University to study theology. His first-choice college – St John’s – turned him down, but he gained a scholarship at Christ’s College. Even as an undergraduate his intellect and breadth of knowledge was such that he did not have to face the shock many Oxbridge students have to negotiate when they cease to be a big fish in a small pond and enter the elite world of gifted academics. One close college friend jokes that Rowan as a student seemed to know “as much aged eighteen as I know now in my sixties”. Rupert Shortt recounts how Barbara Dancy, a mature student, missed a lecture and asked Rowan if she could borrow his notes, to be informed that she could but she might have a bit of trouble because he had written them in Latin. Unsurprisingly, he gained a First in his initial exams and a starred First in his final exams in 1971.

Among his tutors and lecturers was Donald MacKinnon (Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, 1960–78) whom Rowan described in 2010 as, “one of the most overwhelming influences on my thinking”. Many themes within Rowan’s thought that shaped his ministry as archbishop – the interrelationship of theology and philosophy, the place of the tragic and the experience of suffering, the questioning nature of revelation and hence of proper theology, and the importance of self-emptying (kenosis) – can be traced back to MacKinnon’s influence. They also share a similar approach to the theological task. The opening words of the Independent’s 1994 obituary of MacKinnon captures a quality also evident in Rowan’s academic career and episcopal ministry: “His greatest strength was the breadth of human experience and learning which he brought to bear on deep, intractable problems which others tried to tame by isolating monodimensional aspects of them for minute analysis.”

It was clear Rowan would pursue doctoral research but its focus was not obvious. He left Cambridge to study in Oxford (first at Christ Church and then at Wadham) and turned his mind, in what he describes as a “rather deliberate counter-cultural move”, to Eastern Orthodoxy. Supervised by Donald Allchin, he completed his thesis, entitled “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique” and was awarded his doctorate in early 1975. This deep intellectual and spiritual engagement with Lossky (1903–58) and Russian Orthodoxy more widely moulded his life and thought. Among the key influences are the interconnections between doctrine, worship, and spirituality, which would be a hallmark of his writing and ministry from the start. Perhaps even more important was his immersion in the apophatic tradition of Christian theology. This emphasizes the limits and failings of all of our attempts to speak of God and, in Rowan’s words, “says you will never get it wrapped up, you will never have it completely sorted”. Lossky also solidified Williams’ constant and emphatic focus on God as Trinity and the scandalous humiliation of the cross as the revelation of God’s personal being. This leads to the centrality of kenosis as the heart of the divine life which in turn reveals what we are called to in our lives. As Williams wrote in 1979, in words which capture a hallmark of his ministry as archbishop, “the renunciation of existing-for-oneself is man’s most authentically personal act and so also man’s most Godlike act”. Lossky showed him that the Christian dogma of the Trinity “is ‘a cross for human ways of thought’ because it demands a belief that the abnegation of self and the absence of self-assertive, self-interested ‘individualism’ are the fundamental notes of personal existence at its source, in God”.

On completing his doctorate, Rowan applied for but was not appointed to a post at Durham University. In April 1975 he was left deeply scarred by the tragic suicide of his friend Hilary Watson. Later that year he took up his first teaching post, at the Communi...