Living the questions

Christian Century, April 24, 2002 by David S. Cunningham

TWO YEARS AGO, at the relatively young age of 49, Rowan Williams became archbishop of the Church in Wales, one of the provinces of the Anglican Communion. By that time, he had already taught at various theological colleges in England, and had held two important academic posts (dean of Clare College at Cambridge and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford). He had also published a shelfful of books for a wide variety of audiences--from sermons and popular works on spirituality to technical historical and theological treatises. He is frequently mentioned as a leading candidate to be the next archbishop of Canterbury.

Williams has an unusual ability to hold together elements and perspectives that many Christians assume are mutually exclusive. For example, he studies the Fathers of the church, and is convinced of their continuing relevance today, but he is also a tireless advocate for a more "progressive" ecclesiastical order, including the ordination of women and greater inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians. He is a powerful member of the hierarchy of the Anglican Church, but he is passionately committed to ecumenism, and particularly persuaded of the riches of Eastern Orthodoxy. He is a rigorous historian whose writings are attentive to the most technical details, but he is also a popular preacher and a published poet. His theological convictions point toward something very much like pacifism, yet he remains actively engaged in conversations with the structures of the British nation-state.

Perhaps the reason he is able to hold all these elements together is that he is a very patient person--willing to dwell deeply within the questions, rather than to rush toward quick and easy resolutions. His theological writings often leave readers with more questions than they had when they began. I asked him about his theological style, his chief influences, his theological commitments and his concerns and hopes for the church.

You are a theologian, a priest, a spiritual leader, a poet--can you say something about how this combination of vocations arose in your life?

When I was about 12, I encountered a parish priest who had an enormous influence--spiritually, intellectually and in all sorts of ways. He fostered both the vocation to ordained ministry and the vocation to thinking and imagining about Christianity. He was a great enthusiast for poetry; he got me to read T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. He lent me Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison and was always willing to talk about poetry and theology. He was also a very disciplined priest of a rather old-fashioned kind, who spent a half hour in prayer every morning before celebrating the Eucharist. His blend of intense, personal, disciplined spirituality, on the one hand, and an excited approach to the world of theology and the imagination on the other--that was a big influence.

He reminds me of an important public figure in those days: Michael Ramsey.

Yes, indeed. Ramsey was archbishop of Canterbury during my teenage years. I see him as part of a galaxy of people who were in senior positions of Christian leadership at the time, who seemed to exude tremendous depth, contemplative seriousness and theological imagination. I would also put Pope Paul VI in that group, as well as the then patriarch of Constantinople, and the archbishop of Wales at the time. All of them stood for the fusion of the contemplative, the imaginative, the intellectual and the pastoral which shapes my sense of ministry.

Do you think that kind of "fusion" is harder to find today?

I think that, these days, the culture of the church at large is much more anxious, and much more issue-driven, than it was then, and this makes it very difficult to find that fusion and interaction of elements. Now, there's no point in being nostalgic; that's how it is. But if I were to set something Michael Ramsey used to say right alongside some of the debates in my church and other churches, I do have a slight sense that the horizon has narrowed. The tenor and temper of the discussion has become a bit ragged, and we've lost something of the exuberance of gratitude that comes with establishing broad horizons. That's something I'd like to see returning to the theological discourse of the church: the idiom of gratitudes. I wish we didn't feel all the time that the gifts of God are such terribly fragile things that we can't take them out and enjoy them.

Who are some other figures who exemplify this idiom of gratitude, and this fusion of the spiritual, intellectual and imaginative realms?

When I was an undergraduate, I was studying with John Riches, who was very enthusiastic about Karl Barth. I had gone up to Cambridge in the late '60s to read theology, and was very enthusiastic about Thomas Aquinas. So we spent most of the first year quarreling ferociously. And at the end of that year, he suggested that I take a look at somebody who seemed to have the best of both worlds--a Swiss theologian named Hans Urs von Balthasar. I'd seen his books in the library in Cambridge because Donald MacKinnon--a professor at Cambridge and another great influence--was probably one of the first people in Britain to read Balthasar seriously.