That's Resurrection For You

Reviewing Geza Vermes's new book about the early church, Rowan Williams argues that theologians, participants in ecumenical councils, and other architects of the church in its first three centuries weren't so much making it up as they went along as doing their best to describe the astonishing mystery of the Christ event:

Someone reading the convoluted texts of early Christian argument might well see them less as a series of baroque elaborations on a theoretical theme than as a series of attempts to capture an elusive but inescapable insight. Each effort generates more unfinished business; and the impetus is not to clarify ideas for their own sakes but to do justice to the sense that whatever Jesus introduces into the world is new and awkward enough to need a new vocabulary.

Hat tip to Norris Battin

The Cross Of Anglican Unity

George Pitcher, who spent ten months as Rowan Williams' media strategist, sums up:

Rowan subsumes his own opinions, prejudices and preferences, even substantially his personality, in the service of his archiepiscopacy. It's what characterizes the decade of his incumbency of the See of Canterbury. The cross he bears is Anglican unity at whatever cost to himself. It's why he has disappointed both liberals (where his heart lies) and conservatives (whom his heart encompasses), why his friendship with the ambitious gay campaigner Canon Jeffrey John turned to dust and why he has tried to push through an Anglican Communion Covenant, a code of conduct for the faithful that his own Church has all but rejected for being essentially un-Anglican.

The Church's Barack Obama

And Jane Kramer at the New Yorker on Rowan Williams and why he resigned (hat tip to Norris Battin for this and all the RW links):

Williams is a scholar (philosophy and theology), a teacher (Oxford and Cambridge), and a writer (more than thirty books, including a poetry collection, a biography of Dostoyevsky, and a luminous reflection on the nature of art and love, called “Grace and Necessity”), as well as a priest. In other words, he is a thinker in a world of increasingly harsh theologies. His critics liked to compare him to Barack Obama, because he saw “three sides of any argument” and, as often as not, chose none. The comparison was apt, because, like the President, Williams “reached out” across the aisle—or the transept—to the people most likely to ignore him. He believed that with reason, compassion, and accommodation, he could reconcile a warring clergy.

Being Excluded Because Of Who You Are

Writing at Huffington Post, my LA clergy bud the Rev. Susan Russell on the legacy of Rowan Williams:

[T]he truth is that the sacrifice that will hold the Anglican Communion together is not the sacrifice of the gay and lesbian baptized but the sacrifice of a false unity based in dishonesty. It is nothing less than rank hypocrisy that the Archbishop of Canterbury was willing to lay at the feet of Canadian and American Anglicans the blame for divisions in the Communion when the only difference between what's happening in our churches and in his is that we're telling the truth about it.

Because the truth is there is an ontological difference between feeling excluded because you're disagreed with and being excluded because of who you are. Brother and sister Anglicans walking away from the table because they've been disagreed with is a painful thing. The church walking away from the gay and lesbian baptized is a sinful thing.

The Special Relationship, Church-Style

Diarmaid MacCulloch, scholar of the Reformation and biographer of Thomas Cranmer, weighs the consequences of the Anglican church (in England, that is) rejecting the Anglican Covenant, which was aimed, most observers agree, at punishing the The Episcopal Church and Canadian Anglicans for extending full sacramental status to gays and lesbians:

Anglicanism could be seen as a family: in families, you don't expect everyone to think in exactly the same way. You listen, you shout, cry, talk, compromise. You do not show the door to one member of the family, just because you don't agree with them. Now Anglicans can start listening afresh. The present archbishop of Canterbury has their warm good wishes, as he prepares to use his many talents and graces in a different setting. They should ask the next man or woman in the job to reconnect with the church and the nation.

As MacCulloch notes, while British bishops favored the proposed covenant by a wide margin, priests and the laity opposed it.

Striving For Harmony Between Peoples

Andrew Sullivan seconds this tribute by a British politician to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who announced his resignation today:

In the last three years I have grown to appreciate more and more the fine qualities of Archbishop Rowan - his kindness, his sharp intellect, his dedication to striving for harmony between peoples, especially within the Christian family, his courage and his friendship.

He's shown here during a 2009 visit to the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana, California.

Desmond Schools Rowan

Archbishop Desmond Tutu talks tough to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Anglican Church (in England, that is) because of their equivocation on granting full sacramental status for gays and lesbians. He saves his most withering criticism for those who still insist that homosexuality is a lifestyle:

It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.

Hat tip to Norris Battin

Editor's note: Barry Fernelius, who read the BBC article more carefully than The Episconixonian did, notes that it was published in 2007.

The 1/49th Door

Debating the Archbishop of Canterbury in Oxford on Feb. 23, Richard Dawkins -- our most famous atheist now that Christopher Hitchens has passed or ceased -- surprised the audience by keeping the heavenly door open the crackest of cracks:

[T]he evolutionary biologist [said] that he was "6.9 out of seven" certain of his long-standing atheist beliefs.

Replying to moderator Anthony Kenny, a noted English philosopher, Dawkins said, "I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing (is) very, very low."

A Compassion That Can Change Everything

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth. The Prince of Wales laid a wreath at his grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, and the Archbishop of Canterbury summed up:

A man...who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly. A man who portrays human beings in hell. And yet when we read him, it does not read like bad news. Because what does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption?

In some ways not a great deal. Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognized, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering. He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds.

But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that – in that book, we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favor,” says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness about his wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror. And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy. Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

“We may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace,” says Dickens for his children. And perhaps for us as grownups, or people who might quite like to be grownups one day, that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly, expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favor. Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly, even extravagantly, offering the only kind of love that is appropriate – the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings. An utterly unreasonable compassion, which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.

Two Williams And A Kate

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about a wedding he's got coming up on April 29 in Westminster Abbey:

Any priest or minister conducting a wedding is bound to feel a huge sense of privilege. You’re invited into some intimate places in people’s lives. You’re invited to take part in a very significant moment, a moment of hope; a moment of affirmation about people’s present and future. And I’ve felt very privileged to be part of this event for those reasons. Here are young people sending a message of hopefulness, sending a message of generosity across the world. And it’s my privilege to be able to bless that in the name of God, to witness it in the name of God.

I wonder if he did the counseling. And watch on TV for the moment Prince Charles slaps him on the back and hands him an envelope containing a nice card and £200.

+Will.I.Ams Really Conflicted

Opportunistically and entrepreneurially, the Pope is reaching into the heart of the English Reformation -- a kind of ecclesiastical Tet Offensive -- to steal shepherds and sheep who can't abide a woman in a miter. By joining an outfit called the English Ordinariate, laity, priests, and bishops will be allowed to continue to preserve elements of Anglican worship. The body-of-Christ count so far, according to the London Telegraph:

About 30 groups from across the country are believed to have registered an interest in joining the Ordinariate. This would mean an estimated 500-600 Anglicans, including about 50 priests, will be in the first wave of converts to join the Ordinariate when it is established in the first half of next year.

Just so you can fully appreciate the irony of the positions being taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury (shown here during a visit to the Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana in the summer of 2009), he's gently harrumphing as Benedict XVI moves on his right flank and yet simultaneously supporting efforts to relegate U.S. Episcopalians to the second table of the Anglican Communion because of their insistence on the sacramental equality of gays and lesbians. So it's yes on women but no on homosexuals? Poor Archbishop Rowan: It's never been tougher to be stuck in the middle.

Spinning Tops

Lewis Whyld's pool photo of ecclesiastical half-brothers the Archbishop of Canterbury and Benedict XVI worshiping in London's Westminster Abbey during the Pope's recent visit. Half-sisters Elizabeth I (the originating Anglican) and Mary Tudor (Roman Catholic to the end) are buried nearby, and side by side (not their idea). Were one or both spinning? If so, it would possibly be because they were powerful and accomplished women who now abide in the light of truth. This New York Times article details the tensions, almost all over gender, between Rome and British Anglicans. Benedict says it's a crime to promote ordaining women as priests, whereas it's actually a crime not to. What do you really think the queens would say?

Lift High The Cross

Guess I picked the wrong Advent to give up blogging. The President announced his Afghanistan moves, the Diocese of Los Angeles elected two bishops (my friends and colleagues the Revs. Canons Diane Jardine Bruce and Mary Glasspool, the latter pictured here with another pal, Evan Gillette from St. Andrew's in Fullerton), and the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement implying that the other U.S. dioceses should vote against Mary+ or else. When a thoughtful brother in Christ suggested on Facebook that a clean break between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion might be the best way forward, enabling us to redirect the energy we're spending on bickering, I demurred -- and, of course, dragged Nixon into it:

A number of folks on both sides of the issue feel the same way. Speaking personally, I am not eager to have our national church drummed out of a Communion rooted in the English church which was my grandparents' settlement to me and my family. Nor do I think that further schisms honor the body of Christ, even if laying down the cross of conflict and tension might feel like a relief.

I regret the seeming harshness of the ABC's comment; and yet I assume he regrets what he takes to be the harshness of our action to the extent that it interferes with the dance he has been doing (with considerable success) to hold the Communion together after 2003. I believe him to be a learned, gracious, and pious man and would not want to be in his slippers. If there are to be momentous consequences resulting from what we have done, maybe it was his job to make sure our dioceses realize it.

This Advent, as we await the Prince of Peace, a quote from RN: "To lower our voices would be a simple thing."

Blunting The Islamification Of Christianity

The New York Times on Saturday's Vatican meeting between Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:

[Williams]...questioned why the longstanding dialogue between the religions had foundered over the question of female clergy.

Here's why, your Grace. The pope's brazen move to convert British Anglican priests who oppose female bishops is an obvious sign that he considers the Roman Catholic Church's misogynist ecclesiology to be its leading missionary edge. Because it marginalizes women to say they shouldn't be bishops or priests (or pastors, as most U.S. evangelical Protestants still do). It devalues women to say that they aren't pure enough to do sacramental work. It insults women to claim that they are a lessor order of humanity, as Gen. 2 seems to teach, though Gen. 1:27 does not (which notion of creation have you been taught and do you prefer -- woman made as an afterthought from man's rib or male and female created simultaneously in God's image?). It cuts women off from the grace of God itself to say that God and our LORD Jesus Christ view them as less worthy to preach and teach and bless and absolve in their holy names.

Treating women that way in the church either makes sense to one, or it doesn't. It evidently still makes sense to Benedict, but my guess is that, deep down, it doesn't make complete sense even to young American Roman Catholics, both male and female. And it no longer makes sense to most in the Episcopal Church, which has had female priests since the 1970s and now has a female presiding bishop, nor to ++Rowan, who favors the British Anglican church eventually ordaining women as bishops.

So how long are we reportedly besieged, marginal, so-called progressive Christians -- especially those who believe that Jesus Christ's radical and reckless love extends to male and female followers, apostles, and priests in precisely equal, which is to say infinite, measure -- going to continue acting so defensive? How long are we going to let Christians whose view of women tends to mirror Islam's have the upper hand in the church and especially in the news media, which largely dictate how secular society views people of faith?

Precisely as long as we continue to let our critics get away with pretending the great debate is about something else entirely. So-called orthodox conservatives like to say the church is mainly having an argument about the authority of scripture and the role of gay and lesbian people. It behooves them to do so to distract the attention of the half of the human race about whom Christendom is truly convulsed. Will or will not the relatively small minority of Christians who are absolutely right on this issue finally be able to stand up for women and blunt the Islamification of Christianity?

Thanksgiving Anticipating Chaos

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, evidently reflecting on the possible consequences for the Church of England of the Pope's bid to persuade Anglican priests who don't like female bishops to defect to Rome:

The archbishop, in his [Sunday] sermon, said: “God knows what the future holds for any of us for any of our ecclesiastical institutions but we can at least begin with what we can be sure of: that God has graced us with the lives of saints; that God has been credible in this fellowship with these people.

“This church, with its very particular place in the history of the Church of England, is one small but significant facet of that great mystery and that great gift. And, at times when the future seems more than usually chaotic and uncertain, it doesn’t hurt simply to give thanks.”

Material Life, Inhabited By God

In a speech on Tuesday about the environmental crisis, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says people should act locally, globally, and biblically:

The Christian story lays out a model of reconnection with an alienated world: it tells us of a material human life inhabited by God and raised transfigured from death; of a sharing of material food which makes us sharers in eternal life; of a community whose life together seeks to express within creation the care of the creator. In the words used by both Moses and St Paul, this is not a message remote from us in heaven or buried under the earth: it is near, on our lips and hearts (Rom.10.6-9, Deut.30.11-14). And, as Moses immediately goes on to say in the Old Testament passage, 'You know it and can quote it, so now obey it. Today I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death...Choose life' (Deut.30.14-15, 19).

Dept. Of Problems I Didn't Know We Had

The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks up about U.S. obligations toward a group of Iranians living in Iraq who are opposed to the regimes of the Shah (old news) and his successors.

Repent And Save

The world's top Anglican says the church was bamboozled by financial experts.

Boss And Big Boss

That's Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Archbishop of Canterbury Roman Williams (center, with beard), preparing for ++Rowan's evening talk at General Convention.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Our Citizenship In Heaven Has Begun

From the Easter sermon of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury:

Now we should not doubt for a moment that Paul means what he says and that he takes for granted that the resurrection of Jesus is not a piece of fantasy or wishful thinking but the actual emptying of a grave. However, the point of Paul's entire teaching on the resurrection is to take us much further than that. This event, the emptying of the grave, has done something and has brought the Christians of Colossae - like all Christians - into a new universe. They are living in a new climate, with new 'thoughts' - a climate in which the various ways in which we've put up barriers between ourselves and God have been shattered and our old selves are dead. We may still go on trying to put those barriers back up again, but something has happened that opens up a new kind of future. Our selfish and destructive acts and reactions can be dealt with, overwhelmed again and again by the love shown in the cross of Jesus. Because of Jesus' death and rising from the dead, our resurrection has started, and our citizenship in heaven has begun.