What is more, Dr Williams is not an uncomplicated liberal, even on social matters. He is, for example, conservative on abortion and has always had quite a strong conservative streak to his theology. You would not find him questioning the Resurrection. He is married to an evangelical, Jane, who is also a theologian and writes on Scripture for the Church Times.
The Archbishop has also been much moved by stories from countries such as Pakistan, where Anglicanism is a minority persecuted religion. There, the Muslim majority berates Christians for their decadence and links them to American cultural imperialism. That the American wing of the Anglican Church has elected the first openly gay bishop has made life even harder for minority Christians in the developing world.
The Archbishop, if anything, sees too clearly the problems of both sides. He knows that to the outside world in the West the Anglican Church looks absurd in its tortured machinations over homosexuality, an issue most modern Westerners long ago resolved. But he also knows that to much of the developing world the Church looks horribly decadent. Dr Williams accepts the integrity of the conservatives’ position, even if personally he does not agree with them.
It was his respect for their views and willingness to engage with them that made the two-day primates’ meeting rather more of a success than many had expected. Nobody threatened to leave the Communion; no doors were slammed, literally or metaphorically. It was quite a feat for the Archbishop to persuade his fellow primates to spend the first day not discussing homosexuality but examining the value they put on preserving the Communion. He made them acknowledge publicly that homosexuality was a second-order question for the Church.
In the first paragraph of their statement, in words that sound as though they came straight from Dr Williams’s pen, the primates affirmed “our firm desire to remain part of a Communion, where what we hold in common is much greater than that which divides us”.
Dr Williams has always been attracted by this aspect of Anglicanism; that it is a Church that can allow diversity of opinion. However, this raises two problems for him. One is that, as Archbishop, he has to put forward views that represent the mind of the Church rather than his own. Yesterday, on Radio 4’s Today programme, he said that Gene Robinson’s consecration should not go ahead. Yet this is a man who has railed against the hypocrisy of a Church that allows gay bishops if they are in the closet.
On last night’s Conversations with Rowan Williams on Channel 4, the Archbishop declared: “One of my worries, at the moment, is that we are losing the ability to tell stories about ourselves, about a continuous self that evolves in relation to God over time.”
How he is telling his own story is becoming problematic. He has broken up his self-hood into bits: one bit is what he has to believe as Archbishop of Canterbury; another is what he believes as a gentle and liberal theologian. This burden must weigh heavily.
Yet it is not as if Dr Williams is lying. He is doing what he believes to be in the best interests of the unity of his Church. If anything, it is humility that he is expressing: his personal views cannot be important enough to imperil that unity.
The second problem for him as Archbishop, that Roman Catholics do not face, is a lack of authority. Dr Williams is not an Anglican Pope. He cannot decree a position.
As he said on Channel 4 last night, there is nothing new in this conflict. Schism is the norm rather than the aberration. Many good and holy men have found themselves in Dr Williams’s position, trying to keep warring sides together. No wonder he dubs Photius of Constantinople a hero.
He was “probably the foremost scholar in Christendom”, with an “eirenic and patient spirit, all the more admirable for being rare in this story”. Doesn’t that combination sound rather familiar?
Changing attitudes
July 1989: “There is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm, however important and theologically significant it may be.”
August 1998. Signed letter from 200 bishops apologising to gays and lesbians for the Lambeth Conference ruling: “You, our sisters and brothers in Christ, deserve a more thorough hearing than you received over the past three weeks. We will work to make that so.”
March 1999: “I did come to a point where I could no longer say the biblical account answers all the questions (on homosexuality). The Church should be rethinking its position on this.”
July 2001: “If the Church’s mind is that homosexual behaviour is intrinsically sinful, then it is intrinsically sinful for everyone. It is that unwillingness to come clean that can’t last. It is a contradiction.”
Early 2002: “There is a good case for recognition of same-sex partnerships if they are stable and faithful. Same-sex relationships might be legitimate in God’s eyes. It becomes trickier when you deal with homosexual clergy. I became aware that one person had such a relationship. I did tell him that if it became a problem and he was criticised, I’d back him.”
May 2002: “Some of what has been said through the centuries about homosexual behaviour by the Church is not quite adequate to what we now understand. That is my personal view.”
November 2002: “I don’t think I would (ordain a practising gay) at the moment. It becomes a matter not just of my personal view but for the discernment of the Church.”
December 2002: “What at first sight seems absolutely straightforward when you look in the Bible, when you look a bit harder, may not be.”
May 2003. Statement made with primates: “The question of public rites for the blessing of same-sex unions is still a cause of potentially divisive controversy. We, as a body, cannot support the authorisation of such rites.”
June 2003. On Canon Jeffrey John’s appointment as Bishop of Reading: “Confidence in the ability of a new bishop to minister to those in his pastoral care is a centrally important matter and it is clear that serious questions remain in the Diocese.”
October 2003. Calls for Gene Robinson to stand down: “I believe that on a major issue of this kind the Church has to make a decision together. If the Church were ever to change its view (on gay clergy) it would have to be because the Church as a whole owned it, not because any one person’s conviction prevailed.”
