[Dialogue] 4/19/12, Spong: The Retirement of Rowan Williams - The Archbishop of Canterbury

[Ellie Stock]

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The Retirement of Rowan Williams - The Archbishop of Canterbury
Note: Last week's column was published with a typo in the email address for the Westar Institute.  If you are interested in more information about the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar, the email address is members at westarinstitute.org.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Dr. Rowan Williams, has recently announced his plans to retire at year’s end. This announcement was greeted with little notice or emotion.  This fact may be attributed to the declining influence in the Western world of religion in general and of Christianity in particular or it may be a commentary on the effectiveness of this particular Archbishop of Canterbury.  I suspect it is some of both.  The words used by those who did take note of this coming retirement were “tragic,” “misunderstood,” “agonizing,” “pitiful,” “heroic,” and “impossible.”  I regard his tenure in the symbolic top position in the Anglican Communion as a lost opportunity. I see his stewardship of this office as a time in the life of our Church when great potential was wasted and leadership was dissipated by weakness.
I have known Rowan Williams for a long time.  I met him when he was the “Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity” at Oxford University.  He was a brilliant scholar, learned in his own field, but able to participate in almost any academic debate with skill and competence. He stood in what I would call “the liberal-Catholic wing” of our Church.  He was a graduate of one of the most Catholic of our theological schools, yet his enormous mind made him both an intellectual and an emotional liberal.  In the ecclesiastical debates of his generation, he was clearly and firmly on the side of the full inclusion and ordination of women and he was outspoken on behalf of justice and the welcome of gay and lesbian people in all phases of church life.  In his career as a bishop, prior to being tapped for the post at Canterbury, he had ordained an openly-gay man to the priesthood.  He had even been part of a committee chosen to meet with the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, a rather inept evangelical figure, to help this man understand the ramifications of his overt public homophobia.  When the retirement of Archbishop Carey was announced, there was a groundswell of support for Rowan’s appointment.  By this time he had left Oxford to become Bishop of Monmouth in the country of Wales and eventually had been appointed the Archbishop of Wales.  Though it was not usual for the Church of England to choose its archbishop from outside the nation of England itself, Rowan’s ability did single him out as so exceptional as to be worthy of consideration.
There was, however, organized negativity against him in conservative and evangelical circles because of his openness on the issue of homosexuality, which was at that time consuming the communion especially among the Anglican churches in Africa and the Third World.
At the Lambeth Conference of 1998, probably the worst ecclesiastical gathering that I have ever attended, homophobia was rampant with George Carey leading the charge to put our communion on the side of extreme negativity to gay and lesbian people.  Rowan Williams played a major role at that conference delivering lectures that were erudite and brilliant, but Rowan avoided this subject like the plague, lest he damage his chances to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
People need to know that this position is not filled by an elective process.  The Church of England is the Established Church, so this office is filled by an appointment made by the Queen based on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, the head of the government.  The Prime Minister at that time was the Labour Party’s Tony Blair.  A Crown Appointments Commission, made up of members of Parliament and high officials of the Church of England, nominates two candidates for the Prime Minister to consider. He may pick one of the two or ask for more names until a person acceptable to the Prime Minister is produced.  Tony Blair chose Rowan Williams.
When his appointment was announced, I wrote a column applauding the choice and articulating the talents he would bring to that office, but I offered a warning.  “I have known this man for a long time,” I said, “and I have never known him to stand firm for anything.”  It was a glimpse into things to come.  His appointment, however, was greeted with loud negativity from African bishops and their evangelical soul-mates in the Church of England.  Threats to the unity of the Anglican Communion were made by these angry African bishops.  Rowan collapsed on the spot and on what was close to his first day as Archbishop-Designate, he wrote a letter to all the bishops announcing that he would not push them on the issue of homosexuality.  It was the most breath-taking abdication of authority in the role of an international leader I have ever witnessed.  On that day this man’s leadership was permanently crippled.  It did not get better.
Every lobbying group in the Church of England now knew that the Archbishop would collapse under pressure.  A year or so later, Richard Harries, the highly regarded Bishop of Oxford, announced the appointment of two auxiliary bishops to his diocese.  One of the two was a well respected New Testament scholar named Jeffrey John, who was also a publicly open gay man.  This appointment went through all of the hierarchical decision-making processes including the approval of Rowan Williams and was presented to and affirmed by the Queen.  When news of Jeffrey’s appointment became public, the hostility from evangelical sources flowed.  Lambeth Palace, the home of the Archbishop, and Jeffrey John’s home, south of the Thames, were picketed by hostile demonstrators. Once again, Rowan collapsed.  He summoned Jeffrey John to Lambeth Palace and compelled him to resign the appointment “for the sake of the unity of the Church.”   He did, but one cannot achieve unity by rejecting a whole group of people.  Unity based on anything but truth is nothing more than an oppressive, religious idolatry.  I do not want to be part of a church united in racism, sexism or homophobia.  I much prefer a church that is smaller, but faithful.  From that day on, Rowan lost the support of the liberal side of the Church.
There was also a vindictive side to Rowan Williams that few saw.  At the Lambeth Conference of 1998, I was active in trying to keep the conference from taking a homophobic position.  As such, I was attacked and personally vilified by evangelicals including Andrew Carey, the son of Archbishop Carey, who wrote for an evangelical magazine of little integrity.  Andrew had asked me why third world churches were growing and first world churches were struggling.  I replied that the third world churches had yet to go through the intellectual revolution that has engulfed the west over the last 500 years from Copernicus to Stephen Hawking.  He turned that response into a headline that stated “Bishop Spong Says Africans Are One Step Away From Witch Doctors.” This opened the gates to further hostility, which I received in spades.  When I tried to get the progressive bishops to prepare a minority statement that many could sign, these bishops declined because I had become “too toxic” and any suggestion that I made was dismissed.  In this context, Rowan Williams agreed to write an article for the national Anglican paper called The Church Times, based on the “Twelve Theses” that, in Luther-like fashion, I had posted on the Web for debate.  These “Theses” were part of the launch of my book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.  In this article, however, Rowan avoided engaging the content of the “Theses” and  descended to the level of a personal attack, likening me to a “sixth former” in the English school system, that is, a twelfth grader. For him to attack in this manner the vocal supporter of gay rights at this conference provided him with an opportunity to court the favor of the conservative bishops, inoculating him from criticism from that source and making him a more acceptable candidate for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury for which he was clearly campaigning, but in a “humble” way.  It was an ancient ploy, but without merit. I responded with a point by point rebuttal that the same The Church Times, published about two months after the Lambeth Conference adjourned.  By that time, it did not matter to Rowan’s campaign for Archbishop.  He had been appointed.  Subsequent events did indicate, however, that he remembered this attack.
In the early 2000’s, the Board of the Gladstone Library in the United Kingdom, where I had led sold out conferences for about a decade, recommended that I be elected a “Fellow of the Library.”   On hearing this, Rowan wrote a vigorous letter to the Warden of the Library opposing that honor.  The Board, knowing me quite well, ignored the Archbishop’s request and elected me unanimously.  When I heard of this letter, I wrote Rowan and inquired as to the reason for that strange passionate vendetta.  He never answered.  In my opinion, this act revealed his petty side.  This was not the act of the “monk-like, holy man” that he cultivated as his public image.
When Rowan retires at the end of this year, I discover that my primary emotion is sadness.  He was the one person, who possessed the greatest potential for effective leadership in the life of the Church that I have ever seen.  By the time of his retirement, however, he was an empty man without a center; who stood for nothing higher than to keep the Anglican Communion unified in its negativity to gay people.  His signal effort, the creation an “Anglican Covenant,” to which all parts of the Communion would pledge their support, was little more than a feeble attempt to exercise control in the name of an imposed unity.  The week that he announced his retirement, the Church of England announced that a majority of its dioceses had rejected that Covenant! The Church of England had rendered its judgment on his Archbishopric.
Rowan Williams will not be remembered well by history.  The tragedy is that he had the talent to be much more.  He was a failed leader because he never had the courage to stand for any truth that was costly.  That, however, in where leadership is born, where it is revealed and where it is demonstrated.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Trevor, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am hoping you can answer my question.  The thing is, I have been very worried for some time and even more so now.  I've heard and read some parts (from various websites) of Revelations.  I'm a 27-year old man, nearly 28, and I'm scared!  I'm scared that the world will end! I hope that I don't sound silly, but then again I hope I'm worrying about nothing.  With 2012 being repeatedly said to be the end constantly, I guess it grinds you down eventually and I see many natural disasters, wars, economic failures and nuclear weapons, divisions between countries.  I want to live free of these constant worries, but the way of the world is really getting me down.  I'm half full of optimism and the rest is filled with fear and despair.  I do hope you can get back to me.  I have been watching you on YouTube and have found your words to be so comforting.
Answer:
Dear Trevor, 

People have predicted the end of the world for centuries and they are still waiting. I’m sure the world will come to an end someday when either the sun burns out or the gravitational pull on the earth weakens and we move closer and closer to the sun.  One of these two possibilities is anticipated to happen in the next six to seven billion years.  I recommend that you not lose sleep about it in your lifetime. 

Strange weather patterns are related primarily to global climate change due to the human use of fossil fuels and not to divine retribution.  Wars have gone on since human life emerged out of its evolutionary past.  Economic booms and crashes have occurred in every system of government that human beings have ever devised.  We have had nuclear weapons since 1945 and we are still around.  Only one nation has ever used these weapons against another nation and that was the United States.  Finally, the division of people into clans, tribes, city-states and now nation-states has been a fact of life since the dawn of civilization.  The struggles that go on today in the Middle East were going on thousands of years ago according to the Bible. 

Irresponsible preachers frequently hype a series of events to scare people, eliciting a variety of responses.  If you are hearing constantly that 2012 is destined to be the year in which the end of the world occurs, then I can only surmise that you are listening to one of those irresponsible preachers.  History has been full of them.  None of them has proved to be correct yet.  I suggest that you inquire as to the real agenda of someone who likes to tell people that the end is near. I always wonder who authorized them to speak for God! 

We have had great disasters in history.  We lived through the Ice Age, the plague known as the Black Death and terrible times of protracted wars.  In each of these disasters, I’m sure that some religious person, feeling that he or she knows the “plan of God,” interpreted these things to be the coming end of the world. 

I suggest you recognize this stuff for what it is; go to work each day, love your family, enjoy your friends and make each day of your life count.  I have never known chronic anxiety to help anyone do anything. 

~John Shelby Spong





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