Dr Rowan Williams is understood to have told friends he is ready to quit the highest office in the Church of England to pursue a life in academia.
The news will trigger intense plotting behind the scenes over who should succeed the 61-year-old archbishop, who is not required to retire until he is 70.
Bishops have privately been arguing for Dr Williams to stand down, with the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, telling clergy he should give someone else a chance after nearly ten years in the post.
I have great admiration for Dr Williams as a writer and an academic.
His brilliance as an academic is not in contention. His leadership is. The Anglican Communion has suffered enormous damage during is tenure as ABC. I would be hard pressed to think of a more ineffective leader during a time of great moral crisis.
Honestly I would have more respect for the man if he had just openly supported the heretics that now dominate the CofE and TEO.
[blockquote]I would be hard pressed to think of a more ineffective leader during a time of great moral crisis.[/blockquote]
On the contrary. Rowan has been VERY effective at leading the advance of a vile and divisive agenda along with his allies in the Episcopal Church USA, Canada, etc. His skilled leadership in slow-rolling the orthodox catholic biblical elements in the Anglican Communion deliberately enabled the triumphant ascendancy within the Communion of people like Katharine Jefferts Schori and other fellow travelers. He successfully accomplished the objectives of disintegration, division, dismemberment, and separation necessary to fulfill the goals of the Prince he serves. We may not like the lake of fire into which Rowan has led the Anglican Communion, but he has done a splendid job of leading us there.
Any predictions from those on the ground in Britain?
Dr. Williams has helped a lot of people to examine their faith, priorities and direction and to exchange complacency for conviction, confusion for coherent doctrinal understanding and ignorance of spiritual and moral matters for greater understanding – just not the way a leader such as John Stott and J.I Packer or even C.S.Lewis have done. Williams has done so, by being the devil’s advocate.
Love this last paragraph in the story:
“Over the last year however, he has been less preoccupied with internal ecclesiastical disputes and has become increasingly outspoken on political issues, opposing Government plans to sell off publicly owned forests and then attacking the Coalition’s education and welfare reforms.”
Yes — don’t be “preoccupied” with your church, Dr. Williams. Best to be preoccupied with government plans and politics — maybe you can do for them what you have done for the Anglican Communion.
He is a man who is clearly out of his element.
I’m hard-pressed to disagree with #3, so I won’t.
#8 and #3, yes, Dr. Williams was very effective in quenching the burgeoning influence of the orthodox Primates, and remarkably effective at deflecting any official call for repentance and discipline.
Having presided over the wreckage of the international Communion, he will stay, he says, to see the passage of a female bishops initiative, one that fails to treat traditionalists with the respect which was promised, thus completing the wreckage of the CofE. A sad legacy.
There are two sides to the coin. For those in the CofE who applaud the direction it has gone in, Rowan is the man-of-the-hour. Just as Schori is a ground breaking leader of epic proportions for those in TEC who applaud its direction. Both corrupted organizations will promote even more leftists into the top positions until the thing finally crumbles down.
Who takes Rowan’s place is of far less importance than the question of how does the orthodox portion of the Communion move forward knowing that the CofE and TEC are lost for a long time to come.
This is an exceptional opportunity for the Anglican Communion to be saved and turned to a proper course. I would hope that the Gafcon Primates and the orthodox faithful in the US and UK push the Queen and HM Government to appoint a conservative. I read somewhere once – forgot where – that the CoE traditionally alternated between liberal and conservative ABCs. Is this true? Above all, we should pray for the right result. This can be like Ronald Reagan changing US political life; who’d have thought it’d happen back then.
Nice idea #11 but who are these orthodox candidates? For years a traditional view on holy orders and sexuality has barred people from the episcopacy.
It’s a thankless job. He’s got several responsibilities, one of which is making sure that nobody is happy.
I hope that this is merely a rumor, and that he will stay a few more years. He’s one of the few bishops who’s a competent public intellectual and theologian.
I’m glad he is our Archbishop, though I’ve disagreed with him.
@12. Several. You may find it odd that one of the legacies of ++Rowan’s Archepiscopate has been a record number of evangelical appointments to bishoprics. Should you ever read a liberal blog you would find they are furious with him for this. Two very recent examples have been the appointments to Durham and Winchester. And yes it is tradition to swap evangelical and anglo catholic archbishops, so an evangelical of stature would be in poll position.
#14 You did read what he wrote didn’t you? “For years a traditional view on holy orders…has barred people from the episcopacy”. I think he’s referring to women priests. Who was the last evangelical opposed to women’s priestly ordination appointed a diocesan bishop?
RE: “You did read what he wrote didn’t you?”
I expect he was referring to all the “open” evangelicals — in other words, the moderate-to-libs who claim to be evangelical, [like the Affirming “Catholics” who claim to be AngloCatholic], and who cackled happily over the legislation for women bishops that did not offer protection for the orders of AngloCatholics but then got angry at the Ordinariate and AC’s leaving.
Hopeless.
A Grima Wormtongue. Evil is best accomplished if it is not noticed. Rowan played the snake for a long time and people were still arguing that he was being “balanced.” Then came Dar es Salaam:
His undermining Dar es Salaam with his attempt to limit the American question to 2 hours,the release of the sub-committee report just prior giving the TEO a pass but one of the members of the sub-committee hadn’t even seen, the deadline isn’t a deadline, the early invitations…
Incredibly after all that, there will still Comm-conners thinking he was on their side.
Lies. There is no truth in him. He is far worse than Schori because he is so competent at duplicity. May be wracked with guilt for the evil that he has done to lead him to repentance.
What Sarah said…
17, that’s what I remember and that is when I realized that he was not to be trusted because he was false.
Robroy (#17),
We normally agree on most things, but I’m afraid that I must respectfully disagree with your characterization of ++RW as a Grima Wormtongue type of figure. If we are going to use LOTR analogies, I think a better one would be to compare the learned theologian with Grima’s master Saruman, chief of the elite order of wizards. Thinking he was wiser than everyone else, he fell into folly and was corrupted by what he saw in his crystal ball/palantir. For our real Enemy, much more devious and powerful than Sauron, showed Williams, like Saruman and Denethor, only what he wanted him to see, which was the almost inevitable victory of the pro-gay ideology and agenda in the secular world of the Global North. And ++Williams is simply unable to conceive of the CoE, or Anglicanism, becoming truly counter-cultural and forsaking its state church heritage and character to take its stand resolutely against the cultural mainstream, as Rome has bravely done.
I’m not saying the analogy is perfect. There are clearly aspects of Saruman that don’t fit the ABoC, and vice versa. But you’re right, robroy, that both Saruman and Grima were traitors. And we would do well to heed Gandalf’s warning, that even after the fall of Isengard, the sorcerer retained a dangerous ability to beguile lesser minds: “[i]Beware his voice![/i]”
But who will break his staff and expel him from the order of wizards?
Alas, “[i]How are the mighty fallen![/i]”
There is a Grima Wormtongue in the Anglican world, however. And that would be…
the utterly corrupt and worthless PB, ++KJS.
David Handy+
The choice of the next ABC could help patch the communion back together if they selected one that demoted TEC in terms that would allow the GAFCON primates back into the fold, which would certainly include a countervailing promotion of ACNA. That could be if the next were more like Carey. But I think it more likely that the next will be more like Williams, hardening the division and encouraging the global south out in preference to TEC money and theology (and those in the CoE who are enamoured of TEC’s money and theology). Indeed, the next choice seems more likely to be so unacceptable that it precipitates a formal end to a worldwide communion centered on Canterbury than not. Imagine the next enthronement attended about as well as the last Lambeth, with even greater consequences for Anglicanism.
Efforts should be made to prevent that, and undoubtedly archbishops will confer and institutes will write papers on what must be done. I presume that canvassing for the next ABC may include the global south primates who cover the vast majority of Anglicans, but I do not know that it will this time, or that they will be listened to be those in the UK who hold them in such contempt. If recent Anglican history is a guide, it could be seen as humanly hopeless and in God’s hands.