Saturday, September 10, 2011

Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to retire next year

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.

Lambeth Palace would not be drawn into confirming or denying whether the archbishop will be leaving next year.

A spokesman would only say: "We would never comment on this matter."
Read the rest here.

11 comments:

Ecgbert said...

He seems like a mild-mannered professor. I wish him well. But I'll miss that rich voice at royal events like the recent wedding.

Matthew M said...

I am truly torn by this Archbishop of Canterbury. On the one hand he comes across as a loving pastor who truly wants the welfare of others. On the other hand as ABC he has singlehandedly destroyed the Church of England and the Anglican Communion by conforming to the World rather than just being in the World as commanded by Christ.
For the sake of his soul I hope he does step down.

Ecgbert said...

Torn? It's not worth being torn about. Spiritually that thing, that denomination, was destroyed when the king forced it into schism from Rome and turned it Protestant for his selfish reason. No point blaming the nice professor born into it whose job has no power to change that.

William Tighe said...

If I might demur slightly, but not substantially, with what the YF has written here, it is simply that "Erastianism," whether in its original form of subservience to Public Authority in the determination of doctrine and practice or in its contemporary form of subservience to bien-pensant public opinion, has been written into the genetic code of Anglicanism from its origins.

For more, see this book review of mine from 1999:

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0599-tighe

If I may be so immodest as to say it, the events since its publication have demonstrated both its accuracy and its prescience. publication

Matthew M said...

Professor Tighe thank you for the link. Just read the article.

"the events since its publication have demonstrated both its accuracy and its prescience." Not immodest at all. Almost prophetic.

YF, my being 'torn' is on a personal level not a spiritual one. I think he could have stood firm on evangelical, orthodox and catholic principles defending historical Christianity and been recognized as a 'Defender of the Faith" instead of a destroyer of the same faith. I am not one of those Orthodox or Catholics who believes that no Grace can be found in anyone out outside the Orthodox or Catholic Churches. Erastianism in the west or Caesaro-Papalism in the east, it's just not kosher.

Ecgbert said...

I am not one of those Orthodox or Catholics who believes that no Grace can be found in anyone out outside the Orthodox or Catholic Churches.

Neither am I. Just agreeing with Dr T that the problems you see now are not bugs but features in Anglicanism's design or DNA as he says. It's a liberal Protestant denomination, no matter how orthodox or not the Archbishop of Canterbury is.

You see, I came to the faith thanks in part to finding Anglo-Catholicism when I was a teenager: sweet little parish church on the outside, 19th-century Roman Catholicism inside. So I've actually gotten past the disappointment and, out of respect for the Anglicans, don't tell them how to run their church. This leftward course is natural to them.

Visibilium said...

I'm sure that academic theology has manufactured truly meaningful distinctions between a king who subjected a church to Tudor pressures and a secular-ruler pope who subjected the church to Hapsburg pressures.

Ecgbert said...

Oh, please. That's just superficially smart-sounding sophistry. The kind a lot of Anglicans like. The answer is the difference between an infallible and a fallible church. The Hapsburgs knew it was impossible for the Pope to change defined doctrine. Not so the church the Tudors created.

Visibilium said...

"between an infallible and a fallible church"

You concluded your argument with your premises. That's how this issue usually plays out, don't you think?

Ecgbert said...

You're Orthodox, right? Are you trying to draw a parallel between the 1500s papacy and Henry VIII's claimed church powers? If so, again no sale. The Byzantine emperor and later the Russian tsar were like the Hapsburgs in that they politically pressured the church but never dared claim they could change its essentials. (For example Peter the Great abolishing the patriarchate but not bishops.) Different from changing a church's principles, from giving the king an annulment he didn't deserve to having gay weddings for some American bourgeoisie.

Visibilium said...

You're Orthodox, right?

It depends on whom you ask. After my dismal culinary discipline during the Nativity Fast, one of the priests thinks I want to be Episcopalian, where fasting isn't an issue.

Now that the pleasantries are over, let's cut to the chase. If it hadn't been standard practice for the pope to grant annulments to rulers, Henry wouldn't have thought of it on his own. Don't pretend that some grand theological doctrine was involved. Henry was Defender of the Faith, remember? He knew enough about Old Rome's sacramental theology.

Gay weddings? What does that have to do with Henry Tudor? And, what does the bourgeoisie have to do with it?

The plain fact is that the Anglicans who continue the traditional faith of their church, i.e., the continuing Anglicans, have nothing to do with gay weddings. And that church is pretty much filled with bourgeois folks, from what I can see.