WHERE ANGELS TREAD ALL THE TIME: ROWAN WILLIAMS ON ANGLICAN IDENTITY
Anglicans have, for at least a century, produced a vast corpus of works concerned with “Anglican identity.” A simple search for books with those two words will reveal that this tendency has only accelerated with time. If one were to include blog posts on the topic, no merely human person would be able to read every word. In between just the first and final draft of this essay a new book has come out on the topic. It is curious, then, that a common refrain from some corners is that “Anglican identity is confused.” What is confusing to me is how anyone could say that about a topic that has been written into the ground.
When the 2008 Lambeth Conference took place, I was deep into the theology blogging scene at the time and, being a blogger, considered every thought I had at the time worthy of being published. The English-speaking Anglican world was abuzz with thoughts on what needed to happen at the conference in order to “save” the Communion. Whatever else happened at the conference, the sense of disorder was thought by many to be a result of Anglicans having “lost” their “identity,” the swift recovery of which would mend our eccleisal wounds. At least this was a common view among those concerned with the moves in “liberal” churches like the Episcopal Church and Church of Canada to normalize same sex marriages and bestow ordination on clerics in “practicing” same sex relationships.
I had only recently been confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I was raised Pentecostal but, through a now-standard series of existential crises related to my inherited faith, had come to Anglicanism in the hope that I would at last feel at home in this church. If C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright could be Anglican, then so could I. Much is made of the “desire for liturgy” that puts former evangelicals onto the “Canterbury Way,” but not much on reaching out to historic churches to find emotional stability. Perhaps because this is an impolitic way to talk about something so “personal” and “holy” as changing your church. Many of us produce spiritual melodramas about discovering “the true church,” about our being inexorably brought to a vision of transcendent verities, truths that endure in churches that never change, despite changing times. But I am running ahead of myself. I did not know at the time that I wanted stability, because that would have required a better understanding of how spiritually weak I actually was and am. I didn’t realize that I was externalizing my own crisis onto the institution, expecting it to be able to account for my personal anxieties.
There are multiple strategies that people use in order to define and secure what they believe are the true marks of Anglicanism. One is discovering essential characteristics that manifest in every age. This method distills an Anglican “spirit” that remains constant throughout history. If we could just live up to this true core (so the thinking goes), then we could discover the real unity that brings all church parties together (except the “bad” parties, of course). Anglicanism, in this picture, has a purpose - a destiny, even. Since Anglicans were so central in the beginning of modern ecumenism, it was natural that we fancied ourselves the great unifiers. Anglicans had managed to retain both “catholic” and “protestant” elements; thus it was common to position our identity as a bridge, unifying the best in both traditions. This is a synthesizing tendency, one common in classic works such as Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s “The Anglican Spirit” and “The Gospel and the Catholic Church;” and in Martin Thornton’s “English Spirituality.”
Another way to understand Anglican identity is to attempt to locate a fixed center of practice or belief, deviation from which is generally thought to be the reason for modern Anglicanism’s ecclesial woes. The most common “center” consists in the final shape of the documents of the Elizabethan Settlement, specifically the 1662 Book of Common Prayer with the 39 Articles, and the ordinals of the same. The final form of the homilies may be included for good measure. After a hundred years of discord in the wake of Henry VIII’s reign, it is supposed that the Church of England settled into the distinctive form, the true form, of its life: Catholic order, Protestant doctrine, and royal supremacy. In most modern forms of this, “cultural” tendencies of (usually) English genius are included. Unfortunately, what counts as “properly” English is so plastic that this tendency not-uncommonly devolves into racism or nostalgia for Boomer childhoods. Rather than being synthetic, this way of seeking to articulate Anglican identity relies on exclusion. Those forms of Anglicanism that do not conform to the gold standard are aberrant, and (so the logic goes) ought not to be tolerated or encouraged. It is thought that spiritual renewal would naturally flow in such places as true Anglicanism is allowed to flourish.
I must confess this second path has never much appealed to me in large part because the Anglican figures I most resonated with didn’t put much stock in it. Ramsey in particular drew more frequently on people like F.D. Maurice and Charles Gore, who came much later. But it wasn’t until I dove deep into the work of Rowan Williams that my intense anxiety concerning the Communion began to melt away. Williams’ legacy as Archbishop of Canterbury is not yet settled. As the one who presided over the 2008 Lambeth Conference, he has had to bear the responsibility for our projections, as if his decisions had had the potential to resolve decades of dispute. His choice not to hold deliberations on sexuality were seen by many to be either a weak failure of leadership (“Now is the time to compose our anathemas!”) or insufficiently radical (“You support inclusion, now stand up for it!”) I will not purport to settle this myself, but I want to suggest that Rowan’s approach to Anglicanism has much to teach us, though we can only discover this in a roundabout way. He will not tell us how to settle it.
Williams has two works primarily concerned with Anglicanism: “Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness” and “Anglican Identities.” He is an editor and contributor to the former, and author of the latter. Both evince a common strategy implicit in their form and titles. Whatever else Anglicanism is, it is not reducible to a spirit or an essence. “Love’s Redeeming Work” is a gigantic reader, designed to allow us to become familiar with a range of figures who have contributed to our shared life. If you want to know what Anglicanism “is,” there’s not much to do but to dig in and become familiar with people who have been Anglican.
“Anglican Identities” reveals its angle in the plurality of the title. This little book is a collection of essays on figures that range from an early English reformer (Tyndale), to J.A.T. Robinson. If Williams can speak of an “Anglican mood,” he is not hasty to overdefine it. Rather Williams, in his typical fashion, writes lucid and close commentary on these diverse writers, giving at turns praise and critique, but never from a position of defensiveness.
Williams’ strategy to “solve” the “crisis” of Anglican identity is not to solve it at all. It’s not that Williams doesn’t think Anglican doctrine exists. He’s clear that it does, and that a laissez faire laxity with regard to what the Church confesses is theologically dangerous and intellectually lazy. But Williams doesn’t believe that what unifies any church is anything other than the prior act and power of God in Jesus. If this sounds like a theological deus ex machina, an easy way not to engage in the disputes that are before us, that would be to patently misread him. As an example we can turn briefly to one of his essays on Richard Hooker.
Williams’ first essay on Hooker opens with reference to two early sermons in which Hooker defends his conviction that the Roman Catholic Church is a real church. Williams points out that Hooker does not do this because he believes that if a church is in error it doesn’t matter; rather Hooker believes “to make salvation conditional upon a full and flawless apprehension or articulation of faith is thus to undermine the central Reformation principle itself, the priority of God’s active righteousness” (25). If an English reformed theologian can affirm unity across such great a divide, it should be all the more possible for Anglicans to discover a unity that is not predicated on conditions that would fix our identity in such a way that we believe we can take preeminence over the justifying action of God. “Theological truthfulness is not fully at our disposal because holiness is not fully at our disposal; thus theological truthfulness, while genuinely, even painfully desirable, cannot be deployed as a condition that can confidently be managed so as to determine the limits of the true church” (26).
What’s remarkable about Williams is that despite incredible pressures from multiple parties in the Anglican Communion, at a time of intense anger, to determine where true Anglicanism was to be found, Williams never failed to expect bishops to understand that even in confrontation, especially over vital questions such as those concerning the holiness of non-heterosexual unions, the people they were facing were people who were already bound to them by the saving action of God; and that any attempt at final closure was bound to be at odds with the central reformed convictions that Anglicans actually share. When Anglicans try to secure institutional well-being by willfully refusing to recognize the Church in its concrete form, they are trying to do without their siblings, whom Jesus himself calls his own. “Since one of the chief sources of anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect our picture of ourselves as right and good, one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue.” For Williams, churches that are concerned primarily with negotiating conflicts of ecclesial identity are ones that have taken their eye off the ball. Healthy churches are ones that are able to give patient attention to the ones Christ is already at work in, to learn to see in our siblings the active, foundational life of God: a life that is never exhausted or frustrated by our failures, but always ready to break out and make things new.
