RELIGION: Shadows over Lambeth Palace
It could have been worse, it really could
Dr Rowan Williams is a liberal.
‘No!’ I hear you gasp in ironically feigned horror; ‘How should I ever have guessed?’
But it is not quite as simple as that: the thing is that, unlike the illiberal thought police of political correctness who can countenance no opposition to their own ideological agenda, Dr Williams really is a liberal. By all accounts, he does not try to crush those who disagree with him; but recognises their integrity and believes that there must be a place for them within the church. His active encouragement of the establishment of ‘flying bishops’ in Wales, for those who cannot support women’s ordination, is clear testament to this.
Paradoxically, for conservatives, this is simultaneously Dr Williams’ redeeming feature and his besetting sin.
The new Archbishop is not simply a replica of the standard issue, literally or metaphorically bearded, anti-Thatcher clergyman of the 1980s (of whom there are not a few still around today). If, like me, you were told by your Vicar a couple of decades ago that Harvest Festival had been cancelled because it was ‘triumphalist’, and that instead we were going to have a display on starvation in the third world (about which we were supposed to feel thoroughly guilty because it was, of course, our own personal fault), you might not long for the return of those days. Or do you, perhaps, harbour nostalgia for the memory of Dr David Jenkins, the notorious former Bishop of Durham, who made some rather inappropriate remarks about the Resurrection and who, during the miners’ strike, described the Chairman of the Coal Board as ‘an elderly, imported American’? I do hope not.
Rowan Williams, for all his undisguised left-wingery, is not quite like that, and one cannot but be grateful. He may have some pretty dodgy opinions himself on social and political questions, but at least he wouldn’t be so insensitive as to force them onto the rest of us (although he does, he says, believe that there needs to be ‘a debate’).
The trouble with this approach is that it’s somewhat relativistic to say the least, and relativism is surely not what most of us are seeking in an Archbishop of Canterbury?
My own belief is that some of the evangelical groups rather over-egged the pudding in their recent calls for Williams to resign before he had even been enthroned. However, it is not that surprising that they failed to be comforted by his assurances that he would not seek to impose his own views upon the Church where these differed from the Church’s official position, such as on the question of homosexuality.
What we are faced with is nothing less than the spectre of a religious leader who openly disagrees with the teachings of his own Church. For a Church of England desperately (and, too often, ineptly) trying to cling on to the remains of its credibility in an increasingly fractured and secularised society, this cannot be an effective way to improve the Church’s standing.
The problem is, ultimately, one of moral absolutes. Modern secular culture doesn’t believe in them; we know that. But the question is: does the Church, these days? And does Dr Williams?
Liberals always have a problem with objective moral standards and absolute truths, which are essentially illiberal; and, when the moral authority of Almighty God is brought into the equation, the nature of the problem is thrown into sharp relief. There is, after all, no room for compromise with God. There pretty much seems to be a consensus that, at the time of the fall, God did not contemplate building onto heaven a self-contained Province for Lucifer, with a flying bishop to look after him.
Rowan Williams is clearly uncomfortable with trappings of authority, as evidenced by his desire to refer to his Enthronement as a ‘welcoming’, and his diatribe against a Church supposedly ‘obsessed with titles and status’.
The new Archbishop’s disestablishmentarian tendencies constitute a further example of this: for one thing, Establishment binds the Church closely into the pomp and circumstance of those State and, especially, Royal spectacles that Britain still manages so well (despite, it should be noted, the fervent efforts of the New Labour project). One cannot but wonder whether Williams is not also at some level uncomfortable with the idea of Britain as a ‘Christian country’ — not, after all, a liberal concept as recognised by your average Guardian reader.
Dr Williams would not, of course, be the first lefty bishop to get himself into a muddle over trying to take the absolutism out of Christianity. Who (try as one might) can forget the Rt. Revd. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, and his book Godless Morality, the central thesis of which appears to be that morality is essentially a human construct? (I must admit that I have not read this book and, since it is reported to contain certain mildly obscene words that I do not wish to quote nor ERO to publish, I have no intention of doing so; but the former bishop was so successful a self-publicist that actually reading his śuvre hardly seems necessary.) More recently, the current Bishop of Oxford, the Rt. Revd. Richard Harries, has written God Outside the Box, attempting to engage with those who are critical of the Christian Religion: it is probably fair to say that Christian Apologetics never got more apologetic than this.
Our new Archbishop, though, is a clever man; and the knots in which he ties himself will be so elegantly constructed that, half the time, we shall not immediately notice that they are there; and neither will he, since he is, by most accounts, also a good and holy man (which nevertheless does not prevent him from being thoroughly misguided), and he will not seek to deceive us to a greater extent than he has unwittingly deceived himself.
So all in all, conservatives must find room for gratitude that, despite his faults, we have got Rowan Williams and not another David Jenkins, or a Richard Holloway, or a Richard Harries. The danger is that, in challenging him when he is wrong (and he will be wrong; and he will need to be challenged), we further weaken that very concept of authority on which our understanding of the Christianity, and of the Church, depends. And, like all the best conundra, this dilemma is not going to be an easy one to solve over the coming years.
Quinquagesima writes on religious affairs for ERO
Quinquagesima, December 14, 2002 09:42 AM