What might be some of the most basic faith-derived or faith-related values that we might want to put into our present crisis and its challenges? And I'll simply suggest three. First – keeping promises. On the whole, religious people believe in a divine agent, power or presence that is faithful, consistent, dependable, truthful. As we seek to live a life that is in harmony with that divine reality, then faithfulness and trustworthiness are utterly fundamental to how we approach our sense of the good life. The further away you are from the people you're contracting with, the harder it is to keep a lively and vivid and self-critical sense of the necessity of keeping promises. Second, the sense of living in a world that does not belong to you and is not simply under your control. It is a gift to be stewarded and creatively and justly used. And going with that, of course, the sense that your own will and your own desires don't necessarily define what's good for anybody or anything. …in Leviticus we're told very firmly that the land is, so to speak, lent to you. You don't own land as a thing; you control the profits of the land over certain limited periods, because the land belongs to the Lord. The earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it, and that, I think, is again the fundamental principle. And the third religiously derived and related principle, is the belief that ultimately, what is good for me and what is good for you are not detached, separate, non-connecting things. Finally, my life and your life belong together. My flourishing and your flourishing belong together. …We as Christians talk about the image of God, and Jews also. But however we put it, there is that sense that humanity is, in some sense, one. As a Christian, that would go still further, to the imagery of the body of Christ, in the sense that the suffering of one becomes the suffering of all, and the wealth or welfare of one becomes the wealth or welfare of all.

Archbishop Rowan offers some principles

The idea that any action, however extreme or disruptive or even murderous, is justified if it averts failure or defeat for a particular belief or a particular religious group is not really consistent with the conviction that our failure does not mean God's failure. Indeed, it reveals a fundamental lack of conviction in the eternity and sufficiency of the object of faith.

Religious violence suggests an underlying religious insecurity. When different communities have the same sort of conviction of the absolute truth of their perspective, there is certainly an intellectual and spiritual challenge to be met; but the logic of this belief ought to make it plain that there can be no justification for the sort of violent contest in which any means, however inhuman, can be justified by appeal to the need to â??protect Godâ??s interestsâ??. Even to express it in those terms is to show how absurd it is. The eternal God cannot need â??protectionâ?? by the tactics of human violence. This point is captured in the words of Jesus before the Roman governor: â??My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fightâ?? (John 19.36).

Archbishop of Canterbury - Response to 'A Common Word between Us'

If it is true that, as Tertullian said, 'one Christian is no Christian', then by the same token we should be able to say, 'one bishop is no bishop', and so 'one local church alone is no church '. A bishop is not an individual who 'represents' the local church as if he is empowered to speak for its local identity like a politician for his constituency. The bishop is above all the person who sustains and nourishes within the local church an awareness of its dependency on the apostolic mission, on the gift from beyond its boundaries, of the Church established by the Risen Lord – and he does this, of course, primarily and irreducibly as the celebrant of the 'Catholic oblation'. Hence, again from the earliest days, the clustering of local churches and their bishops around metropolitan sees which represented the channels through which the Gospel came to be shared; and hence the insistence (an insistence that might almost be called fierce in many instances) that bishops received ordination from their neighbours in the metropolia under the leadership of the local primate – and hence too the seriousness of communicating episcopal election by letter to the region and the severity of the sanction of removing a bishop's name from the formal intercession list.

Primacy needs to be seen as a sign of the continuing reality of active tradition—that is, the sharing of the gift—as the foundation of each local church. So it should be exercised in the service of the further sharing of the gift; this is why it is problematic if a local church so interprets the gift it has received that it cannot fully share it beyond its own cultural home territory... reminding the local assembly and its chief pastor that it must not lose its recognisability or receivability to other communities – across the globe and throughout history.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury: Mother Churches?

Some 18 different groups â?? mostly of Catholic and evangelical inspiration, mostly small outfits â?? have united to oppose the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in a campaign called Passion for Life. But it has failed to make much impact in the media. The pro-abortion and pro-embryo research lobbies are far more powerful, far better organized, and use sophisticated, well-funded PR techniques to get their message across.

But the pro-Life movement also has to ask itself where it is going wrong. More than 50 percent of people oppose the creation of hybrids, two-thirds of the population want there to be fewer abortions, and there is deep unease about â??saviour siblingsâ??. Fewer than 10 percent of the British population go to church, so this is not, despite appearances, a disagreement between religious people and secularists â?? despite these being the voices most often heard in the debate. Yet the pro-Life movement is seen as an essentially religious lobby, for whom embryos have souls and for whom abortion is above all about sin. The fact that the pro-Life movement has been unable to capitalize on the widespread unease at the further erosion of respect for human life should cause it to reflect not just on its aims and strategies, but on its inability to connect with wider public opinion.

Austen Ivereigh Emancipate the Embryo

Passion for Life - MPs vote 'Yes' to animal/human mixed embryos, 'Yes' to Saviour (or spare part) siblings, 'Yes' to end of Fatherhood and 'No' to tighter abortion laws

My Archbishop was given the title Civil and Religious law in England: A Religious Perspective.

But my Archbishop did not say that 'some aspects of Sharia law "seem unavoidable"', as is widely reported.

He said that

‘a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that 'power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents' (Ayelet Shachar Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (2001) p. 122) – seems unavoidable.

and this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a 'market' element, a competition for loyalty.

But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable.

An element of competition between jurisdictions, or a 'market' of jurisdictions, for certain carefully specified matters – THIS ‘seems unavoidable’.

It seems unavoidable given that what we want is 'a pattern of relations...in which overlapping affiliations work for a common good'.

It is only unavoidable if we want the common good, mind.

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

In other words, the reporting of this lecture was untruthful. Lambeth does understatement, I do understatement. Do you really need me to say 'They lied'?

So what did he really say?

In his lecture, the Archbishop sought carefully to explore the limits of a unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims. Behind this is the underlying principle that Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences. In doing so the Archbishop was not suggesting the introduction of parallel legal jurisdictions, but exploring ways in which reasonable accommodation might be made within existing arrangements for religious conscience.

What did the Archbishop actually say?

The media is hostile here in the UK, to the Christian faith, but also simply to ideas. The Archbishop was invited by jurists to give a lecture, in the High Court, to the relationship of law and communities. The press headline was 'Archbishop says Sharia 'inevitable''. This is what you can expect from our press. They consider the Church easy meat, as indeed it is as long as we have no basic ecclesiology. It would be a pity if Christians around the world were unable to read our headlines of our media without any critical hermeneutic. When see the media stoning a Christian, you conclude that he must have done something wrong? Did you learn nothing from Regensburg?

My Archbishop said that more formal recognition of the range of jurisdictions is 'unavoidable'. There is a range of jurisdictions, so for example, two participants to a dispute are sometimes able to choose which tribunal they wish their (civil) case to be examined under. This is takes place now, has always taken place and is very basic to English common law. The only strange thing is that governments have been in denial about this in recent decades. This is part of a decay of civil society that is consequent on understanding our relationships to each other only in terms of rights (and never responsibilities) and understanding governments as service-providers and ourselves as consumers of their products. The result of this is that we believe that governments are to do everything and we are to do nothing: over the long term this makes for totalitarianism - and it is no less totalitarian because we are complicit in it.

The Archbishop believes it is 'unavoidable' that this denial, of civil society, by governments and people, should come to an end. He is right that it should come to an end, and I hope he is right that its end is 'unavoidable'. But if this sort of intelligent, and Christian, contribution to the public square is so vehemently jeered off by the media (BBC is no different from the Murdoch press in this) a smaller, stupider public square in which no one dare say anything intelligent (never mind anything Christian) is the only 'unavoidable' thing here. Like any Christian, an Archbishop can take a lot of flack from opponents of the Church, and it is his priestly calling to do so. But when you, a member of the Church, stand in judgment on him and so leave him to face this fury on his own – who will be there for you, when you are the one picked on?

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a speech entitled Civil and Religious Law in England: a religious perspective

In contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law...

If the law of the land takes no account of what might be for certain agents a proper rationale for behaviour – for protest against certain unforeseen professional requirements, for instance, which would compromise religious discipline or belief – it fails in a significant way to communicate with someone involved in the legal process and so fails in one of its purposes.

There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a 'covenant' between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity. There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice.

Anthony Bradney offers some examples of legal rulings which have disregarded the account offered by religious believers of the motives for their own decisions, on the grounds that the court alone is competent to assess the coherence or even sincerity of their claims. And when courts attempt to do this on the grounds of what is 'generally acceptable' behaviour in a society, they are open, Bradney claims, to the accusation of undermining the principle of liberal pluralism by denying someone the right to speak in their own voice.

The Archbishop is asking a single question, to two audiences – liberal secularists and British Muslims.

Can the State be truly secular? Can it provide the open stage for a variety of ways of life in one national community? Can the State avoid turning secularity into an ideological secularism that denies real pluralism? It denies real pluralism when it blanks out all our motivations, determining that they are merely private, interior to the individual, and may have no public expression. Our motivations relate to traditions of thought, religious and other. Is the State determined to make us all ‘citizens’, on the French pattern? Is the State able to allow any community to provide its own forms of arbitration? If not then, then we will have the courts ruling on every industrial dispute for example, because there can be no local forms of arbitration between employers and unions. We will have the courts deciding on divorces because the State cannot tolerate any panels, not instituted by law, by which couples could attempt their own reconciliations or settlements.

The same question, put to the Muslim community, might take this form:

Can the Muslim community support the secular public square? Can it concede that it shares the public square with non-Muslims? Can the Muslim community obey the whole law of the land, and allow, support even promote civil society? Civil society is a society made up of communities that promote many different, ‘non-islamic’, ways of life. Is Islam able to find within itself the resources to say that 'islam' must mean submission to the law of this country and thus to civil society, made up as it is of other religious traditions?

Citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land.

In our own country, it seems to be assumed by many that if we could only get the relation between ‘faith communities’ right, social harmony would inevitably follow. And conversely, any expression of a belief that one’s own religious loyalty is absolute, any statement of the belief that I, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or whatever, am speaking the truth, is regarded as threatening and unacceptable. Surely the problem lies with this contest over the truth; surely, if religious people would stop speaking about truth and acknowledge that they were only expressing opinions and conditional loyalties, we should be spared the risk of continuing social conflict and even violence.

But what this hopeful fantasy conceals is an assumption that talking about truth is always less important than talking about social harmony; and, since social harmony doesn’t seem to have any universal self-evident definition, it is bound to be defined by those who happen to hold power at any given time – which, uncomfortably, implies that power itself is more important than truth. To be concerned about truth is at least to recognise that there are things about humanity and the world that cannot be destroyed by oppression and injustice, that no power can dismantle. The cost of giving up talking of truth is high: it means admitting that power has the last word. And ever since Plato’s Republic political thinkers have sought to avoid this conclusion, because it means that there is no significance at all in the witness of someone who stands against the powers that prevail at any given time; somehow, political philosophy needs to give an account of suffering for the sake of conscience, and without a notion of truth that is more than simply a list of the various things people prefer to believe, no such account can be given.

Archbishop of Canterbury Lecture given at the Building Bridges Conference in Singapore

Slippage can occur between thinking compassionately about exceptional cases and losing the sense of a normative position.

This is not an argument for unalterable prohibitions in law against abortion in every circumstance - or against divorce or civil partnerships; there is room for disagreement over appropriate legal provision in all these areas. But it is an argument for keeping our eyes open – far more than we have done – for the unintended consequences, the erosion of something once taken for granted which occurs when we do not keep in focus the fundamental convictions about humanity that inform not only our responses to crisis but our routine relationships with each other. Precisely because we don’t bring these convictions to light all that often, they can shift or weaken without our noticing. It’s not a good habit for societies to get into; this debate, and the history of what has happened in the wake of the 1967 (Abortion) Act, should remind us of some of the potential cost of such a habit in other areas.

Rowan Williams on Abortion's other consequences

The presence of the Church, not as a clamorous interest group but as a community confident of its rootedness in something beyond the merely political, expresses a vision of human dignity and mutual human obligation which, because of its indifference to popular success or official legitimation, poses to every other community a special sort of challenge. ‘Civil society’ is the recognized shorthand description for all those varieties of human association that rest on willing co-operation for the sake of social goods that belong to the whole group, not just to any individual or faction, and which are not created or wholly controlled by state authority. As such, their very existence presupposes persons who are able to take responsibility for themselves and to trust one another in this enterprise. The presence of the Christian community puts to civil society the question of where we look for the foundation of such confidence about responsibility and trustworthiness: does this set of assumptions about humanity rest on a fragile human agreement, on the decision of human beings to behave as if they were responsible, or on something deeper and less contingent, something to which any and every human society is finally answerable?

Archbishop Rowan Williams Faith Communities in a Civil Society

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will tonight give an address at Toynbee Hall, in which he will call for a widening of the debate on multiculturalism beyond narrow considerations of ethnicity or nationality, and to take in arguments about globalisation and commerce.

Delivering the lecture, Dr Williams will address the question of the homogenisation of human beings, with the increasing dominance of the global market:

"We live in probably the least multicultural human environment there has ever been. The global market has canonised once and for all certain ways of making: industrialisation is everywhere, the network of global communication is everywhere, the effects of market forces are felt by everyone on the face of the globe….It may be benevolent to some aspects of local cultures; it may learn to speak in local accents for certain purposes, advertising or decoration but it works in one mode of production, employment and marketing, and assumes that everyone is a potential customer. It is as universal as ever Christianity or Islam aspired to be, but the substance of its universality is a set of human functions (producing, selling, consuming) rather than any sense of innate human capacity and of the unsettling mysteriousness that goes with that."

Dr Williams will also argue in his lecture that those who wish to debate multiculturalism should first look critcally at what they mean by the term. He will suggest that the growth of cultural relativism in the twentieth century has led many to feel unable or reluctant to question the values of their own communities or those of others and that this risks the development of a secular state, which is unable and unwilling to exercise moral judgement.

Dr Williams will stress that it is not wrong to expect schools in shared cultures to teach the history or traditions of the majority. This, he will say, is necessary not because it is arbitrarily right to do so, but because children need to be able to understand how cultures evolve - and what forces, for good or ill, have come together to explain the values and traditions society currently holds.

Christianity teaches that each person is created by God with a distinct calling and capacity. For the Christian believer, human dignity – and therefore any notion of human rights – depends upon the recognition that every person is related to God before they are related to anything or anyone else; that God has defined who they are and who they can be by his own eternal purpose, which cannot be altered by any force or circumstance in this world. People may refuse their calling or remain stubbornly unaware of it; but God continues to call them and to offer them what they need to fulfil their calling. And the degree to which that calling is answered or refused has consequences for eternity.

This means that whenever I face another human being, I face a mystery. There is a level of their life, their existence, where I cannot go and which I cannot control, because it exists in relation to God alone – a secret word he speaks to each one, whether they hear or refuse to hear, in the phrase from the prophecy of Ezekiel. The reverence I owe to every human person is connected with the reverence I owe to God’s creative Word which brings them into being and keeps them in being. I stand before holy ground when I encounter another person – not because they are born with a set of legal rights which they can demand and enforce, but because there is a dimension of their life I shall never fully see, the dimension where they come forth from the purpose of God into the world, with a unique set of capacities and possibilities. The Christian will have the same commitment to human rights and human dignity; but they will have it because of this underlying reverence, not because of some legal entitlement.

. . . .

The churches do not campaign for political control (which would undermine their appeal to the value of personal freedom) but for public visibility – for the capacity to argue for and defend their vision in the public sphere, to try and persuade both government and individuals of the possibility of a more morally serious way of ordering public life.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Christianity Public Religion and the Common Good St Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore 12th May 2007.

Now what the events of Good Friday and Easter tell us is that every single human being is implicated in something profoundly wrong. We say, rather glibly, that Jesus died for our sins, that he died to save humankind – and thereby we say that we are all in need of something we cannot find or manufacture for ourselves, in need of a word, a gift, a touch from someone else, somewhere else, so that we can be made free of whatever it is that keeps us in the clutch of illusions and failures. If the purpose of Jesus dying was that all might be made whole, the implication is that all have been sick. So that Good Friday tells all of us, those who think they’re good and those who know they’re bad, all alike, to look inside and ask what part we would have played in the drama of the Lord’s death. There is only one innocent character in that drama and it isn’t me or you. So for all of us there is something in our lives that would, if it came to it, if it reigned unchecked in us, allow us to range ourselves with the crucifiers – some habit of selfishness or fear, some prejudice, some guilt that we don’t want confronted, some deficit in love or lovability. In some way, however small, we have already contributed to the death of Jesus. He is there on the cross because we are the way we are.

But on Easter Day, this bleak recognition is turned on its head. We were all involved; yet the combined weight of every human failure and wrongness, however small or great, all of that could not extinguish the creative love of God. We share one human story in which we are all caught up in one sad tangle of selfishness and fear and so on. But God has entered that human story; he has lived a life of divine and unconditional love in a human life of flesh and blood. He has not protected himself, or forced anyone to accept him. And in this world that human beings have made for themselves, this world of politics and religion and social co-operation, divine love loses. It is helpless to maintain itself in the face of the so-called real world. The vortex of error and failure that affects everybody in the world draws Jesus into its darkness and seems to destroy him body and soul. That, says Good Friday, is the kind of world this is, and we are all part of it.

Yet there is more than the world to think about. If that love is really what it claims to be, eternal and unconditional, it will not be destroyed. What’s more, the human embodiment of that love, the flesh and blood of Jesus, cannot be destroyed. As we heard in the reading from Acts this morning, the friends of Jesus ate and drank with him after he was raised from the dead – as we are doing in this Holy Communion. The life that God brought into the world in Jesus is here for ever with us.

Archbishop of Canterbury Easter Day sermon

The debate triggered by certain decisions in the Episcopal Church is not just about a single matter of sexual ethics. It is about decision making in the Church and it is about the interpretation and authority of Scripture. It has raised, first of all, the painfully difficult question of how far Anglican provinces should feel bound to make decisions in a wholly consultative and corporate way. In other words, it has forced us to ask what we mean by speaking and thinking about ourselves as a global communion. When ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ fail, what should we do about it? Now there is a case for drawing back from doing anything much, for accepting that we are no more than a cluster of historically linked local or national bodies. But to accept this case – and especially to accept it because the alternatives look too difficult – would be to unravel quite a lot of what both internal theological reflection and ecumenical agreement have assumed and worked with for most of the last century. For those of us who still believe that the Communion is a Catholic body, not just an agglomeration of national ones, a body attempting to live in more than one cultural and intellectual setting and committed to addressing major problems in a global way, the case for ‘drawing back’ is not attractive. But my real point is that we have never really had this discussion properly. It surfaced a bit in our debates over women’s ordination, but for a variety of reasons tended to slip out of focus. But we were bound to have to think it through sooner or later.

And it has arisen now in connection with same-sex relationships largely because this has been seen as a test-case for fidelity to Scripture, and so for our Reformed integrity. Rather more than with some other contentious matters (usury, pacifism, divorce), there was and is a prima facie challenge in a scriptural witness that appears to be universally negative about physical same-sex relations.

Now in the last ten years particularly, there have been numerous very substantial studies of the scriptural and traditional material which make it difficult to say that there is simply no debate to be had. Even a solidly conservative New Testament scholar like Richard Hays, to take one example out of many, would admit that work is needed to fill out and defend the traditional position, and to understand more deeply where the challenges to this position come from.

But it is easier to go for one or the other of the less labour-intensive options. There is a virtual fundamentalism which simply declines to reflect at all about principles of interpretation and implicitly denies that every reader of Scripture unconsciously or consciously uses principles of some kind. And there is a chronological or cultural snobbery content to say that we have outgrown biblical categories. These positions do not admit real theological debate. Neither is compatible with the position of a Church that both seeks to be biblically obedient and to read its Scriptures in the light of the best spiritual and intellectual perspectives available in the fellowship of believers. And the possibility of real theological exchange is made still more remote by one group forging ahead with change in discipline and practice and other insistently treating the question as the sole definitive marker of orthodoxy.

Whatever happened, we might ask, to persuasion? To the frustrating business of conducting recognisable arguments in a shared language? It is frustrating because people are so aware of the cost of a long argumentative process. It is intolerable that injustice and bigotry are tolerated by the Church; it is intolerable that souls are put in peril by doubtful teaching and dishonest practice. Yet one of the distinctive things about the Christian Church as biblically defined is surely the presumption (Acts 15) that the default position when faced with conflict is reasoning in council and the search for a shared discernment – so that the truth does not appear as just the imposed settlement of the winners in a battle.

Archbishop's Address to General Synod

In the last century especially, Anglicans have become more and more aware of the theological and spiritual resources of their brothers and sisters in the East; it is not too much to say that both the thinking and the piety of Anglicans would have been unrecognizably different without this growing and thankful awareness; and many of the ways in which we as Anglicans now seek a way forward for the unity and coherence of our own Communion have been shaped by the inspiration of the Christian East.

But in the last seventeen years, this instinct of common emphasis and purpose has been probed and tested at a new depth in the work of our International Commission for Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue. The Commission has not sought to negotiate an agreed position between rival views; it has begun from first principles, reflecting at length on the foundations of the Church in the triune life of God and the interpenetration of divine and human nature in the incarnate Son, and has advanced from there to offer a fresh perspective on the challenges that we face today - within the Church itself and in relation to the world that is hungry for words of life from us. It is a document that seeks unashamedly to lay out the foundation for proclaiming good news to our world: a bold and inviting vision of God’s will for his Church that is more than just the record of an ecumenical encounter.

It reflects many dimensions of our indebtedness to the Orthodox theological perspective; and you, Your All-Holiness, have yourself been a powerful spokesman in East and West for many of the themes that come into focus here. You have taught us, as no other global church leader has, the imperative significance of a moral and spiritual understanding of our material environment as the natural outworking of our faith and participation in the communion of the divine persons. You have witnessed to the difficult task of holding diverse Christian communities together in charity and right doctrine without the sanctions of centralised control. And in this connection we are all sharply aware of how your leadership and witness is exercised in local circumstances of real difficulty and constraint. We wish to assure you of our strong support for you and your fellow - Christians in Istanbul and our continuing gratitude for your courage and clarity as a voice in the Orthodox world and in the Christian world in general.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Address at Evensong 30 January in the presence of the Ecumenical Patriarch, His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, and the International Commission for Anglican-Orthodox for Theological Dialogue

The reason for all this ecumenical malarcky?

The Church, although one, exists as Churches (in the plural), and these Churches exist as One Church in and through constantly receiving one another as sister Churches John Zizioulas The Theological Problem of Reception

One of the most chilling things on this journey to the Holy Land was the almost total absence in both major communities of any belief that there was a political solution to hand. So step back from that for a moment and ask, â??What do both the communities in the Holy Land ask from us â?? not just from that convenient abstraction, the â??international communityâ??, but from you and me?â?? Both deserve the best; and the best we can give them in such circumstances is at least the assurance of friendship. Go and see, go and listen; let them know, Israelis and Palestinians alike, that they will be heard and not forgotten. Both communities in their different ways dread â??with good reason â?? a future in which they will be allowed to disappear while the world looks elsewhere. The beginning of some confidence in the possibility of a future is the assurance that there are enough people in the world committed to not looking away and pretending it isnâ??t happening. It may not sound like a great deal, but it is open to all of us to do; and without friendship, it isnâ??t possible to ask of both communities the hard questions that have to be asked, the questions about the killing of the innocent and the brutal rejection of each otherâ??s dignity and liberty.

Archbishop Rowan Williams The Poor deserve the best Christmas sermon

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has defended the rights of university Christian Unions, saying that Student Union bodies should not discriminate against them simply because they donâ??t approve of their views.

"The danger in issuing sanctions against a body whose views you disapprove of is that it looks like a fear of open argument. If disagreement is to be silenced because offence may be caused, that is not good for intellectual life; it personalises and â??psychologisesâ?? all conflict of ideas and denies the possibility of appropriate detachment in debating issues."

Writing in an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, to be published today [Friday 8th December 2006], Dr Williams says that the judgement that religious views ought to banned because they may cause some kind of offence damages the culture of free exchange on which so much in a university depends:

â??A good institution of HE is one in which students learn that their questions are not everyoneâ??s questions, and their answers are not everyoneâ??s answers. Simply in the fact of being alongside people who are following other academic disciplines, you learn that different people want to know different sorts of thing. You learn that your world is not the obviously right and true one just because you say it is. Whatever convictions you emerge with will have been tested by this critical exposure to other ways of seeing and other sorts of investigation.â??

Student Unions had to consider, he argued, whether their essential role was brokering between different communities from which they drew their membership, or whether they were to function in a central licensing capacity:

â??â?¦ the question that ought to be asked is what those student unions that have sought to withdraw recognition from Christian Unions think their powers are; do they see themselves as â??brokeringâ?? the business of a wide variety of bodies, many of whose views they (naturally) do not endorse? Or do they think of themselves as representing a central authority that can create or abolish associations?"

Christian Unions, he said, certainly had their own questions to answer:

â?? â?¦ some CUâ??s might do well to undertake a little hard self-examination about whether their language is vulnerable to proper challenge; they may need to affirm more clearly and credibly the distinction between declaring behaviour unacceptable and effectively passing judgement on a whole category of persons. But that does not alter the fundamental point about freedom of association. The integrity of the whole educational process in a democracy depends on getting this right, and it should not be obscured by hasty and superficial reactions to what are regarded as unacceptable opinions by the fashion of the day."

Archbishop Rowan Williams Christian Unions should be defended

'He comes the prisoners to release, In Satan's bondage held.' These are words from one of my favourite Advent hymns, 'Hark the glad sound!' And they draw our minds towards an aspect of Christmas that is often neglected because we prefer some of the 'softer' elements in the story.

Jesus of Nazareth was born, lived, died and rose because human beings were not free. Since the dawn of human history, men and women had been trapped – even the very best of them – by the heritage of suspicion and alienation towards God and fear of each other. They had been caught up in the great rebellion against God that began even before human history, the revolt of God's creatures against God out of pride and self-assertion. Satan, the fallen angel, stands as a sign of this primordial tragedy, showing that even the most highly endowed being can be corrupted by self-assertion. All of the intelligence and spiritual dignity belonging to the angels did not stop Lucifer from the ultimate madness of rejecting the God in whose presence he stood.

And this corruption of intelligence and dignity spreads like an epidemic through the universe. We know and sense that we are living in something less than truth or justice, but don't know how to get out of the trap. The birth and life of Jesus don't first of all change our ideas – they change what's actually possible for us. They set us free.

They set us free by re-establishing our dignity on a new footing. Because God himself, God the Son, has taken our human nature to be his, every human being is touched by that transforming fact. The epidemic of rebellion is countered by something almost like a benign 'infection', the touch of God communicated to human nature. We still have to choose to co-operate with God – but he has opened the door for us first by re-creating human nature in Jesus Christ.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Christmas message to the Anglican Communion

The Christian Church began as a reconstructed version of the notion of God’s people – a community called by God to make God known to the world in and through the forms of law-governed common life – the ‘law’ being, in the Christian case, the model of action and suffering revealed in Jesus Christ. It claimed to make real a pattern of common life lived in the fullest possible accord with the nature and will of God – a life in which each member’s flourishing depended closely and strictly on the flourishing of every other and in which every specific gift or advantage had to be understood as a gift offered to the common life. This is how the imagery of the Body of Christ works in St Paul’s letters. There is no Christian identity in the New Testament that is not grounded in this pattern; this is what the believer is initiated into by baptism. And this is a common life which exists quite independently of any conventional political security. Because it depends on the call and empowering of Christ’s Spirit, it cannot be destroyed by change in external circumstances, by the political arrangements prevailing in this or that particular society. So Christian identity is irreducibly political in the sense that it defines a politeia, a kind of citizenship (Philippians 3.20); yet its existence and integrity are not bound to a successful realisation of this citizenship within history. There does not have to be a final and sacred political order created in order for the integrity of the Church to survive.

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The salient point is that a supposedly liberal society which assumes absolutely that it has (as I put it earlier) the resources for producing and sustaining moral motivation independently of the actual moral or spiritual commitments of its citizens, is in danger behaving and speaking as if the only kind of human solidarity that really matters is that of the state. Programmatic secularism, as a shorthand for the denial of the public legitimacy of religious commitment as a partner in political conversation, will always carry the seeds, not of totalitarianism in the obvious sense, but of that ‘totalising’ spirit which stifles critique by silencing the other.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Secularism, Faith and Freedom Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Rome 23rd November 2006

So when we think about the processes of production, about the whole pattern of an economy, we should be asking in what sense it is intelligent production – work directed towards the maintenance of a recognisably human environment. That recognisably human environment is, for the Christian believer, one in which the habits of self-examination and the possibilities of self-knowledge are being nourished – one in which the imagination as well as the intellect is matured. Remember, when Benedict speaks about lectio, the goal he presumes is that of self-knowledge, humility and growth in holiness: the dimension of study in the monastic life is not about developing intellectual skills for their own sake, but a way of advancing in understanding of oneself as made in God’s image, as mortal and fragile, subject to temptation and struggle, and as capable by grace of maturing in service. Just as work is there in order to sustain a life in which study may be properly carried out, so study is an activity sustaining a particular kind of human maturity and self-awareness before God. And in turn this is the context in which prayer and praise emerge as the natural crown of the whole pattern of the life of the Rule. The self-aware, intelligent and imaginative disciple who is formed by labour and study knows that the purpose of his or her life is now turning outwards to acknowledge God: proper self-awareness delivers us from self-absorption, since it shows us what kind of beings we are, what we are made for – which is the enjoyment of God.

A civilised life structured around the vision of the Rule is one in which economics is not allowed to set itself up as a set of activities whose goals and norms have no connection with anything other than production and exchange...

And the Benedictine structuring of time stands as a potent reminder of the balances we risk losing in a culture obsessed with production and reluctant to locate that production in a broader picture of human activity and growth. The pressing issue is how we sustain a civilisation capable of asking itself questions about its purpose and its integrity; only a civilisation that can do this will generate people – citizens – who can turn away from individual instinct and self-protection, whether in adoration of God or in compassion for the needy, because they know what sort of beings they are, mortal, interdependent, created out of love and for love.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Benedict and the Future of Europe * * * *

My respect for this Archbishop of ours grows and grows. From now on you may regard this blog as the Papa Williams Fanclub. Do many of you have an archbishop like this? Hands Up. No, as I thought, not many of you. So then, in the Anglican front row we have Oliver O'Donovan, Tom Wright, John Webster and Rowan Williams, all with beautifully complementary gifts, but the one wearing the 'Most Evangelical' shirt at the moment... is Williams. This speech, given in Rome, is a little love missive from us Anglicans to Rome's current Benedict and affirmation of his leadership in the church catholic.

Yes, we have our very own one-man ‘Deep Church’, right here in London, at Lambeth, and Rowan Williams is his name.

The ‘Sermons and Speeches’ page of the website of the Archbishop of Canterbury is the place to go for contemporary Christian resources.

In the course of a year Archbishop Williams covers a wide range of issues on a large number of occasions and for varied audiences. Some pieces are short and light, and these tend to have the odd titles that reflect the institutions that invited him to be their speaker.

But many of these are big pieces, and we should regard them as our theological resources of first resort. Many of them are about theology in the public square, and so to do with the university as the arena of free public discourse, ‘faith-based education’ and the topic of the moment and foreseeable future – relations with Muslims.

Others are about Anglican unity, Christian unity, and others about discipleship and the ‘religious life’, by which he means the monastic life (which is probably the key for Williams).

His familiarity with the resources represented by the history of the Christian Church and tradition, and his fundamental concern for discipleship and the unity of the Church make his work evangelical. He has a gospel and it is faithful and deep (ludicrous, maybe, that this needs saying). Why doesn't he just preach the gospel? He preaches the gospel – exactly that is what he is doing: not the gospel in half-dozen chords on the charismatic keyboards perhaps, but massively orchestrated, harmonics reaching back and forward. Though he pitches what he says just right for each specific audience, he is also speaking to the longer-term audiences behind them – it is that communion of saints, again. Of course much of it is in a very different idiom than we are used to.

University and public square Though more diffidently, he makes the same case as Benedict XVI that the Christian faith provides the good practices of public reasoning together on which all public discourse, civil society and universities are built.

He gives some of the most revealing and exciting accounts of the Christian faith, or of the contribution of Christianity to the public square, when he is playing away from home and having to go back to first principles – for instance in ‘What is a university?’ in China, in his lecture given to the godless Eurocrats on the Christian contribution to Europe, and ‘What is Christianity?’ in the Islamic University, Islamabad, and his speech to Islamic religious leaders in Cairo. They may not sound inviting, but this is where he is doing the real work of showing the contribution of the Christian faith to public discourse and reason - he usually provides a little history of the relationship of the two - and sometimes his gospel sounds most clearly here.

'What is a university?' Speech given in Wuhan, China. This is my favourite of the moment and I have posted pieces from it on this blog.

Religion, culture, diversity and tolerance – shaping the new Europe - Brussels

Belief, unbelief and religious education – Downing Street 2004

Convictions Loyalties and the Secular State – Chatham lecture 2004

Christian theology and other faiths – Birmingham 2003

What is Christianity? A lecture given at the international Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan

Address at al-Azhar al-Sharif - Cairo 2004

Christian unity One Church One Hope – Freibrug 2006 on Christian unity and the churches’ responsibility for Europe

Christ’s own identity and work was to be found in ‘representative action’, Stellvertretung. Christ stands in our place; all he does is done on our behalf. His perfect obedience is lived out in life and death so that we may live, and for no other purpose, certainly for no individual purpose. But if that is the life he lives, then the life that comes into existence through him must likewise be marked by the same representative quality…

One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church Anglican Global South-to-South Encounter, Ain al Sukhna, Egypt 28th October 2005

The focus of the centre of Anglican energy in the world is very clearly in the global south in our time and it is therefore for me an experience of learning, as well as of fellowship, to be with you…

Christian life – discipleship and ‘spirituality’ Williams’ lectures about Michael Ramsey and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are most definitely about you, me and Williams in the here and now. He is using Bonhoeffer and his situation to talk about us and our situation. (I said this blog would be full of the blooming obvious). He considers this indirect mode intrinsic to Christian discipleship, that we take the cover our predecessors in the faith offer us, and this is an aspect of following them and looking to them for leadership. What we are looking for is not, or not just, resolutions, ways out of our difficulties, but a style of life, an attitude of mind and way of life, which is the way of the disciple, even the way of the cross. See his approval of Ephraim Radner line on the Anglican crisis of faith as the way of the cross in Williams’ Ramsey lecture.

The Lutheran Catholic The Ramsey Lecture – on Michael Ramsey, the UK’s last great theologian-archbishop, gives a very good idea of Williams himself, with links to Bonhoeffer

Sermon at St Matthäus Church Berlin on the centenary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

So if we ask about the nature of the true Church, where we shall see the authentic life of Christ’s Body – or if we ask about the unity of the Church, how we come together to recognise each other as disciples - Bonhoeffer’s answer would have to be in the form of a further question. Does this or that person, this or that Christian community, stand where Christ is? Are they struggling to be in the place where God has chosen to be? And he would further tell us that to be in this place is to be in a place where there are no defensive walls; it must be a place where all who have faith in Jesus can stand together, and stand with all those in whose presence and in whose company Christ suffers, making room together for God’s mercy to be seen.

Williams begins from the life of prayer, spirituality, monasticism.

‘Religious lives’ Romanes Lecture 2004

The Christian Priest Today Throughout Williams tells us that the Christian life is one of suffering witness. It costs and it hurts. It particularly hurts when you are carved up by other Christians, uncomprehending and enraged. The Christian is very likely to be the minority, but must put the Christian proposal out there in the public square for this is the greatest service they can offer their society.

Going through these lectures has made me realise again that whether a leader is good, and able to provide leadership in witness to Christ to the world, is in largely determined by those who follow him - or don't follow him. It is no good Williams saying all this unless the Church (not only Anglican but the whole church in the UK and further afield) receives and affirms this teaching and gives him authority to say these things. He can speak when he speaks from the Church, and this will be when the church hears, assents and gives its audible Amen to all this. We must wake up to the fact that we have a good leader, and stop slouching along as though still led by the B-team. I should have got to grips with the mountain of Williams' Christian teaching before now. We must get stuck into this.

There is more about Rowan Williams at Wikipedia, which has a bibliography.

If you are asked what are the characteristics you would regard as marks of maturity, or having grown up as a human being, what would you say? Let me try a few suggestions. The human adult I imagine is someone who is aware of emotion but not enslaved by it. A human adult is someone who believes that change is possible in their own lives and the lives of those around them. A human adult is someone who is aware of fallibility and death, that is who knows they are not right about everything and that they won’t live forever. An adult is someone sensitive to the cost of the choices they make, for themselves and for the people around them. An adult is someone who is not afraid of difference, who is not threatened by difference. And I would add too, an adult is someone aware of being answerable to something more than just a cultural consensus – someone whose values, choices, priorities are shaped by something other than majority votes…

if we don’t know what it is we are ‘inducting’ people into when we try and help them grow as humans, we cannot be surprised if chaos results.

What if we live in a climate where our emotions are indulged but never educated? That is to say where we never take a thoughtful perspective on how we feel, that brings in other people and their needs. What if we live in an environment where apathy and cynicism are the default positions for most people on issues of public concern? What if our environment is short on dialogue and learning and self-questioning? What if it is characterised by a fear and a denial of human limitations, by a fundamentalist belief in the possibility of technology in solving our problems for example? By the constant bracketing or postponing of the recognition that we have limits and that we are going to die. What if our environment is passive to the culture of the global market, simply receiving that constant streams of messages which flows out from producers and marketers? Because one of the things that implies is that the world ought to be one in which difference doesn’t matter very much because we are all flattened out, as you might say, in the role of consumers. What if our environment is characterised by intense boredom and an addiction to novelty? Or characterised by an obsessive romanticising of victim status, and a lack of empathy? What if it is characterised by secularism, that is to say by an approach to the world which is tone deaf about the sacred and the mysterious?

Archbishop Rowan Williams Formation: Who’s bringing up our children?

The ‘product’ of the university, then, is not simply the person who has acquired skills – technical skills, even research skills; it is the person who has acquired the habit and virtue of learning, and who sees the social world as a place not primarily of struggle and conflict over control but as a context where conversation may be pursued with patience.

And this is a deeply political matter, in the fullest sense of the much abused word ‘political’. It alters what we think we can expect of each other; it challenges any assumption that conflict is the natural position for human beings; when there are clashes of interest, it tells us how to question what we have taken for granted about our own best interests and encourages us to seek for something new that is not just the property of one individual or faction. The university nourishes ‘civility’ – in the narrow sense of patience and courtesy in dispute, and in the much larger sense of concern for proper and open public life in the civitas, the city, the community of citizens.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China

A simple postmodernist assumption that diversity is just a fact of life that needs no exploring and exchange would be a recipe for a depressingly tribal and static intellectual life.

The university, then, sustains a culture of its own, a culture of conversation and mutual criticism and appreciation, in the context of which people may grow into a deeper understanding of what characterises human beings as such in their social interaction. That understanding has to do with seeing human beings as essentially engaged in learning – in enlarging their mental and imaginative worlds and approaching one another with curiosity, patience and welcome, being free to imagine how others ask different questions of the world around them. Within that common culture of a ‘learning humanity’, a university may as matter of historical fact have a visibly dominant cultural presence – perhaps religious, as often in Europe, perhaps deeply bound up with national identity and independence. But if it is to function as a university, this historical legacy will need to be, not neutralised or denied, but understood precisely as a legacy to be used as the soil on which debate can grow. Its tradition, religious, national, or whatever, is not an orthodoxy to be insisted upon (as was the case in English universities until the early nineteenth century) but as a secure space in which other voices are welcome and respected, and where the interaction of different voices and perspectives within the institution is not seen as any sort of contest for dominance. In many circumstances, an intellectual institution that is clear about its history and tradition can be a more rather than a less hospitable place because of this lack of any need to fight for a dominant voice.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China

First – and perhaps surprisingly – there is a profoundly political element in the university. It is taken for granted that those who exercise power in a society need to be formed in a particular culture. They need to learn how to reflect on the social interactions around them; they need to learn how to evaluate the reasons that people give for actions and policies. Part of that training in how to evaluate reasons and arguments – and also ideals and aims – has always involved reference to the basic texts of a culture, sacred or not, which are regarded as setting out patterns of human life in society that continue to serve as an orientation….

Universities should devote serious resource and energy to encouraging public debate on the shared values of their society. This does not mean that a university as such should be a nursery of simple activism and criticism; it does mean, though, that a good university is always looking for ways of opening up general intellectual debate about common hopes and values to the community around it. It does not exist only to refine the work of the specialist…

It is only when universities are free to pose their own questions that they fulfil their function of enabling people to ask about the foundations of what others take for granted.

What is distinctive about the university is that it seeks to nurture the ability to understand political processes and to weigh political arguments rather than giving uncritical loyalty to any programme.

The student who is in this sense discovering what it is to be a ‘political agent’ is discovering what it is to exercise thoughtful responsibility in the life of a society. And this is where a narrow definition of what the social and the political might mean has to be balanced by some historical perspective; it is in fact where (in a very broad sense) the ‘classics’ of a society are relevant, so that a good university allows space for students to test their ideals and concepts against a historical tradition expressed not only in opportunities for discussion but also in the university’s public ceremony and its standards and protocols for intellectual exchange. By its very existence, the good university expresses certain philosophical commitments - to civil discourse, to liberty of expression, to careful and honest self-questioning, and to the possibility of creating trust through the processes of fair argument and exploration of evidence. This cannot be reduced to the narrow atmosphere of pressure-groups.

Ideally, then, the elements of awareness of history and tradition, openness to intellectual innovation and concern for the widest possible engagement with public life should come together in the university to help nurture adult and responsible citizens. But for us in Europe, there are, of course, two major factors which complicate still further the position of the university. One of these has already been hinted at: it is a political and economic climate in which the expectation of short-term and practical results has affected attitudes to ‘free’ intellectual endeavour in some very adverse ways. A proper concern for accountability has produced a real anxiety about the volume of work produced by universities, and an increasingly sharp competitive spirit between institutions. Every university has to promote itself in two directions – towards the public, to keep up recruitment, and towards funding bodies, which in Britain and much of continental Europe will be under government direction, to persuade them of its profitability. This is not a climate that will disappear overnight; it is part of the way in which ‘market’ models have come to dominate so many areas of social and institutional life in our context.

The second of these challenges is the sheer diversity of the cultural scene in the modern West; not only has British culture, for example, lost a degree of contact with and confidence in a history or identity shared by British citizens, it is now inclusive of active and often lively immigrant cultures, whose relation with the majority may be in various ways strained. Against such a background, what would it mean to see the university as offering an induction into some kind of culture appropriate to people who will grow into public responsibility? Isn’t this bound to be hopelessly compromised by the existing dominance of one culture or class or ethnic group (as has been the case in Britain)? In the vast perspective of China’s diverse cultures, similar questions are bound to be in evidence; what role has the university in promoting social and political stability in a context where much rests upon the ability of government to sustain national cohesion and a universal pattern of law, welfare and equity?

Any university now attempting to promote the advantage of one racial or class interest would forfeit its credibility and authority. But the alternative is not an acceptance of pure ‘postmodern’ diversity, a chaos of non-communicating discourses for mutually isolated communities.

Archbishop Rowan Williams What is a university? Speech given in Wuhan, China