A Dim Mirror: Archbishop Rowan Williams's Reflections on the 2009 General Convention

This article examines Covenant, and our Anglican Future, Archbishop Rowan Williams's essay on the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, in which he addresses legislation concerning the ordination of partnered gay clergy and the provision of rites to bless same-sex unions. This article finds Williams's essay deficient on three points: its distortion of the arguments made by pro-inclusion advocates, its ahistorical vision of how change happens in the church, and its idiosyncratic version of Anglican polity, in which national churches (provinces) are artificial constructs and the diocese is the only organic unit of communion. While Williams is a theologian of great renown and ostensibly seeks the maintenance of unity, this essay's failings will likely increase fragmentation in the church. No one could envy the task of Rowan Williams. To be Archbishop of Canterbury is, under the best of circumstances, a fairly thankless job, as one must balance the demands of being a diocesan bishop, the chief primate of the English church, and the figurehead of the Anglican Communion - an Instrument of as a number of documents rather impersonally7 put it. Since 2003, these have not been the best of circumstances, to sav the least, as Anglicans have battled over competing understandings of human sexuality. The Church of England saw a crisis over the nomination of a gay-but-celibate man to be bishop of Reading, a nomination that Williams himself quashed in a spectacular intervention. The Episcopal Church, the Church of England's American cousin, has battled internally over the election and consecration of the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, a partnered, noncelibate gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire. Several dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada are in various stages of adopting rites for the blessing ol same-sex unions: New Westminster has adopted and used them, while the dioceses of Ottawa, Montreal, Huron, and Niagara are in various stages of exploring and developing such rites. South of the border, a number of dioceses of the Episcopal Church have also authorized rites for the blessing of unions or have policies allowing such blessings, among them Los Angeles, Bethlehem (Pennsylvania), California, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Southern Ohio, Southeast Florida, and Washington (D. C). Through all of this, the archbishop has had to deal with competing pressures from progressives and conservatives and with the threat of schism within the Anglican Communion. At certain points in the unfolding drama. Williams, who was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford before being elected a diocesan bishop, has weighed in with a theological analysis or statement, sometimes offered formally as a paper, sometimes in more informal contexts. At Cambridge and Oxford, Williams was a brilliant theologian, the author of a wide-ranging body of work of considerable depth and learning. In the present debate on human sexuality, the archbishop of necessity- has written with a different, non-academic audience in mind. The archbishop lias tended to take a conservative, though not reactionary, line in response to the challenges, whatever his personal views - and the Rowan Williams who was a theologian and diocesan bishop left a paper trail quite different from the Rowan Williams who sits in Lambeth Palace, making it well-nigh impossible for distant outsiders to discern what he truly believes on the issues of the day. It is clear, however, that Williams perceives it to be his role to hold together the Anglican Communion, and that is a task for which no responsible bookmaker would give him easy odds. No one would envy Archbishop Williams, and it would take a cold heart indeed not to pity him. That having been said, the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent essay, Covenant, and our Anglican Future. examining the Episcopal Church's General Convention and more particularly the Convention's approval of two pieces of legislation that touch on human sexuality, is a most unhelpful contribution to the dialogue within the Anglican Communion, as it breaks down on three fronts. …

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