Rowan Williams, Homosexuality and Faith

In the March issue of The Atlantic Paul Elie has a balanced and thoughtful account of the struggles the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has both led and endured on homosexuality and particularly on the issue of gay priests. Entitled The Velvet Reformation, it tells of Williams' efforts to maintain unity within the world-wide Anglican confession while moving the church toward greater inclusiveness and acceptance.

More important, it tells the story of a man who is unwilling to embrace either rigid fundamentalism or laissez faire liberalism, but is determined instead to find a middle way that embraces, rather than shuns ambiguity and uncertainty, and that is concerned with nurturing a community of believers rather than promulgating a rigid morality whether of left or of right.

In reading it I was reminded of Jacques Ellul's argument regarding morality in The Subversion of Christianity. He begins his chapter on the subject by insisting that

God's revelation has nothing whatever to do with morality. Nothing. Absolutly nothing.

He expands on this by noting that

This is why Jesus attacks the Pharisees so severely even though they are the most moral of people, live the best lives, and are perfectly obedient and virtuous. They have progressively substituted their own morality for the living and actual Word of God that can never be fixed in commandments. In the Gospels Jesus constantly breaks religious precepts and moral rules. He gives as his own commandment "Follow me," not a list of things to do or not do. He shows fully what it means to be a free person with no morality, but simply obeying the ever-new Word of God as it flashes forth.

I was reminded too of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov who, encountering Christ in the streets of Seville, imprisons Him and lectures Him on why the freedom He offers is so intolerable and why, for the sake of the people, he, the inquisitor, representing the Church, must lift this intolerable burden of freedom from the people and replace it with a rigid, unbending but safe moral code.

The Church and Christianity more generally has an abundant supply of pharisees and grand inquisitors. What it seems to lack is people like Rowan Williams who are able to freely live with the uncertainty, ambiguity and conflictedness, or to use Williams' term, "contradictedness" of simply and humbly "obeying the ever-new Word of God.