Anglican Identities

by Rowan Williams

Anglican Identities draws together studies and profiles that sympathetically explore approaches to scripture, tradition, and authority that are very different-yet at the same time distinctively Anglican.

Genres: Theology, Christianity, History, Religion, Faith

157 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.

Reviews

[Jon Beadle · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading it in fits and starts I’ve finally completed what I believe to be a concise theological history of the major Anglican players. Many brilliant moments were often coupled with what seemed like labyrinth’s of abstraction. Rowan Williams is never boring. I gonna his take on the controversial (heretical?) John TA Robinson particularly helpful and engaging.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A concise book written by the then-current Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams offers explications into the thought and theology of key Anglican figures such as Richard Hooker, B.F. Westcott, and John A.T. Robinson. These lectures and essays are dense but the reader can glean much about how this diverse cast of Anglicans has approached Scripture and doctrine.

[Jeromie Rand · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams saw the Anglican Communion fracturing around him. The Anglican Mission in the Americas and other splinters off of the Episcopal Church formed shortly before his tenure, and the province of the Anglican Church in North America was created about the time this book was published. The involvement of churches from the global south in the creation of those movements in the USA led to widespread fractures among provinces that held to a traditional formulation of the gospel and those that were open to a new, liberal interpretation.

This book must be seen against that backdrop. Rowan Williams allows historic disagreements within the Anglican communion to serve as a proxy for present day divisions.
Throughout the book he argues that there is a uniquely Anglican ethos that can allow even those who deny the personhood of God to remain in the same church as those who affirm the historic creeds. Williams introduced me to Bishop John Robinson as an advocate of the liberal position, but given the historical backdrop it is hard not to seem him as a stand-in for Bishop John Shelby Spong, who saw Robinson as a mentor.

The failure of this book is, ultimately, the same as the failure of leaders within the Anglican Church to navigate the crisis of the time. Williams wants to maintain a unity based upon a common tradition and a shared intellectual interest rather than a common confession of Jesus Christ as the only Son of God whose death and resurrection provide the only path to salvation. Or, at the least, he allows the meaning of those words to be in the eye of beholder, such that they can be stretched beyond recognition. (Williams has made it clear, in other places, that he believes in an historic Christ and a real resurrection, but he seems to have no stomach for saying others who claim to represent the church must believe the same.)

I appreciate Williams’ grasp of Anglican history, and his insight into the implications of Hooker’s thought, in particular, were worth reading. But toward the end of the book I became disappointed with the number of words that were used to avoid saying what Paul made clear long ago: the church must preach a gospel of Christ and him crucified, or it preaches no gospel at all.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rowan Williams is a first class thinker who grapples with a wide range of authors, not only theological but literary and philosophical. My copy is now heavily underlined and annotated, with a list of works to read pencilled into the back: Tyndale's The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, Iris Murdoch, Robert Browning's A Death in the Desert, and of course Richard Hooker. I found the first three chapters, on Tyndale and Hooker, the most thought-provoking. (The others are on George Herbert, BF Westcott, Michael Ramsay, and JAT Robinson, and a final chap. on four interpretations of the Gospel of John.) In my view, the running theme underlying Williams's idea of Anglican identity is a strong (even traditional) Christology: Jesus the eternal Son incarnate in a specific historical space and time, as witnessed in the Gospels, and encountered experientially in the Eucharist.

[Russrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating analysis and comparison of some of the Anglican tradition’s most formative thinkers. If you are interested to consider, in considerable depth, how God makes Christ present in the Church for the world, then this is well worth the read.

[Nick Spencer · Rating 2 out of 5]

hard work

[Robert Heckner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my Lenten study — an excellent book; Williams is erudite, clear, and engaging. This book serves as a reminder of the great depth of theological resources within Anglicanism.

[Samuel Cheung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would follow Rowan Williams into a burning building

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

We Anglicans are aware of the problems Rowan Williams presents. He is the most brilliant Protestant theologian out there, and his writing is wonderful. Even in this book, which reads like it was tossed off in his free time—one wonders what the postage was when he mailed it in—he presents both challenges and opportunities for growth and understanding. Simultaneously, he hardly misses an opportunity to fail in his role as Archbishop of Canterbury. Most recently, he snubbed the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, a bishop of archiespicopal status and head of a national church, i.e., of the same status as him. This makes reading him sympathetically difficult, great as he is.

Nevertheless, this book is mediocre. There is little thematic continuity, and such thematic continuity as there is seems tacked on, rather than part of a deliberate literary plan of the book. It feels "unfinished." This is the bad news, and it unfortunately overwhelms the good.

Williams, as he frequently does, undermines himself practically in this book. He is at pains to identify people of very different stances, understandings, and approaches to Scripture, reason, and tradition, and to see how they nevertheless retain an Anglican-ness to them. As I mentioned, however, he is ultimately unsuccessful in showing how they are similar, or that there is an "essence" of Anglicanism. What he does is give a number of brief intellectual sketches that provide some context for what it means to be Anglican. In doing so, he shows us that Anglicanism, historically, has had plenty of room for divergent viewpoints. This, of course, is at odds with his push for an Anglican Covenant and for a sort of Anglican papacy with himself at the head, that would decide, determine, and enforce an orthodoxy throughout the many Anglican dioceses throughout the world.

As is often the case with Williams today, I can't help but recommend it, and can't help but find myself disappointed.

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodness. This is quite a hard book. The Archbishop is at the academic level. And I fear he is not that good a writer. What with his convoluted sentences and immensely long paragraphs, I think he does himself and his ideas a disservice. I have gone through the discussion of Richard Hooker and I was enlightened as to Hooker's views on the necessity for a liturgical/prayerbook church simply because the church must include in the Christian life the educated and uneducated, the stupid and the smart, the emotional and the intellectual. This was a nice insight into the controversies with the Puritans and their emphasis on the Word/sermons and therefore on understanding, possibly, to the exclusion of church members who would benefit more from Hooker's liturgical/prayerbook church.

I did get tired out though, and will take a break from this book, short though it be.

********************************

I returned to this book. It is just too thorny for me. Though the names are familiar to me, the detail and intellectual approach is currently beyond me. I will have to catch up on things before I try it again.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essays included in this book (with the subject of each essay in parenthesis):

The Christian Society (William Tyndale)
Contemplative Pragmatism (Richard Hooker)
Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary (Richard Hooker)
Inside Herbert's Afflictions (George Herbert)
The Fate of Liberal Anglicanism (B.F. Westcott)
Theology and the Churches (Michael Ramsey)
Honest to God and the 1960s (John A.T. Robinson)
Anglican Approaches to St John's Gospel (B.F. Westcott, E.C. Hoskyns, William Temple, and John A.T. Robinson)

The essay on Honest to God is included in the 40th edition of Honest to God published in 2003 by WJK.

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Bible is no record of God’s will for abstract fraternity but the story of peoples and families working justice in their concrete situations and finding universal vision only through the specifics of local and particular callings. And therefore it needs in translation a language that can be spoken confidently aloud by actual persons who live by the rhythms of the breath and the temperature and who address one another familiarly.”

[Matt Root · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very informative collection of papers on important contributors to the tradition, but, as a collection of papers, it lacks a guiding theme the ground the explorations. Also, the lack of anyone one from between 1640-1840 left a significant hole that lessened the book's over all usefulness.

[Virginia · Rating 3 out of 5]

You have to really know your stuff to read this book! It was theologically over my head!

[Jonathan]

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