Anglican Samizdat

Wear a veil!

In preparation for his new job as Master of Magdalene College Cambridge, Rowan Williams continues to hone his prodigious talent for saying daft things by declaring that wearing a veil helps Muslim women assert themselves. As everyone knows, Muslim men delight in having assertive wives; that’s why they force them to wear a veil.

From here:

THE OUTGOING Archbishop of Canterbury has shown he will not leave quietly after he reopened the debate over the veil by insisting that the controversial garment can help Muslim women “assert themselves”.

Dr Rowan Williams has questioned the view that women hide behind their veils and warned against “what we sometimes think of wrongly as stereotypes”.

From here:

Is Rowan Williams doing a George Carey? It’s been noticeable how Dr Carey obviously felt more able to speak his mind on controversial issues once he had retired. Since Rowan announced his retirement last week, he too has lost no time in addressing matters in public life more firmly and certainly with more clarity than usual. In fact, in the space of a week, this self-confessed “hairy Lefty” seems to have ditched many of the Left’s shibboleths and prejudices – “diversity,” for one.

Dr Williams said yesterday that “identity” has become a “slippery” word. He added, “Identity politics, whether it is the politics of feminism, whether it is the politics of ethnic minorities or the politics of sexual minorities, has been a very important part of the last ten or twenty years.”

He now thinks, “We are beginning to see the pendulum swinging back… and we have to have some way of putting it all back together and discovering what is good for all of us.”

Rowan may say the opposite next week, of course and he is still sticking by his pronouncement that “adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion” in the UK, so one shouldn’t set one’s hopes too high.

From here:

Good riddance to Dr Williams.

So the Archbishop of Canterbury, has finally announced his resignation. I believe the operative word is “Hallelujah”. I have long felt that the incumbent of this illustrious office has been what we nowadays call a “waste of space”. An airy-fairy academic out of touch with the feelings of common folk and a spouter of politically correct twaddle, a man of zero leadership qualities at a time when we require strong direction from the head of this country’s official religious establishment. Under Dr Rowan Williams’ watch the British have been in danger of utterly devaluing their ancient Judaeo-Christian tradition, which would have been tragic for both the religious and secular alike.

Poor Rowan Williams: he tried to please everyone – or, perhaps more accurately, tried to upset no-one, and, in doing so, earned almost universal opprobrium. Those who said kind things about his efforts, did so because they are his friends and even they struggled to find something good to say about Dr. Williams’ ten year quest to find unity through incoherent indaba babbling.

From a Canadian perspective, not only did he not protest at the deposing of one of the world’s most respected evangelical theologians, Dr. J. I. Packer, but his refusal to grant even a sliver of recognition to ACNA and ANiC effectively scuttled any attempt by ANiC parishioners to hang on to their buildings. The legal argument that crushed ANiC’s chances went along these lines:

• Anglican church buildings are held in trust for Anglicans to use as places of worship.
• The Anglican Church of Canada has strayed from being Anglican as defined by the Solemn Declaration of 1893.
• ANiC members hold to the Anglicanism of the Solemn Declaration and, therefore, are the true Anglicans for which the buildings are intended.

Counter argument:

• Anglican theology is not static.
• The Anglican Church of Canada is the only recognised Anglican organisation in Canada – recognised by Lambeth and the Archbishop of Canterbury, that is.
• The Anglican Church of Canada must, therefore, define what is “Anglican”.
• The Anglican Church of Canada gets the buildings because the buildings are for the use of Anglicans.

Admittedly, those of us in ANiC, including the lawyers – especially the lawyers, perhaps – who thought it might have gone otherwise exhibited a superficially charming other-world naïvety, but, ultimately, it was Rowan Williams who delivered the coup de grâce to any possibility of success.

Good riddance.

Who knew?

To reinforce the point, he went on to note that when he met Richard Dawkins in the recent debate at the Sheldonian, it was “the same sort of experience [as] last October when I went to meet President Mugabe.”

I’m sure Robert Mugabe will be cut to the quick by this comparison.

From here:

Dr Rowan Williams said that he struggled with nerves before squaring up to the man nicknamed the “high priest of atheism” over the existence of God and asked friends and supporters to pray for him during the encounter.

He added that, despite having a grasp of 11 languages, been an Oxford professor and the leader of 77 million Anglicans worldwide, he was “not always very good with words”.

Speaking during a visit to Springfield Church in Wallington Surrey on Sunday he was asked about his recent debate at Oxford University with Prof Dawkins about the origins of life which captured attention around the world.

“I was quite nervous about hat really because I never feel I’m at my best in debates, you have to be quick on your feet and clever and slick and I always feel anxious about that.

“I want to think about what I say and I’m not always very good with words.”

He added: “I had the same sort of experience last October when I went to meet President Mugabe.

It seems that he stands by what he said about sharia law; the real problem is not that sharia law is inherently barbaric, but that the word “sharia” is very “emotive”. And it doesn’t mean what a judge in Saudi Arabia thinks it means, apparently: obviously, in the UK, “sharia law” means what the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks it means.

From here:

The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to resign and return to academia as master of Magdalene college, Cambridge.

Williams, 61, will leave at the end of December in time to start his new role next January.

His time in office has been marked by a slowly growing schism in the worldwide Anglican church, which he has failed to heal. Williams has been attacked by conservatives for his liberal views on homosexuality and by liberals for failing to live up to these principles.

It’s hard to see Rowan Williams’ tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury as anything other than an unmitigated disaster: from unproductive indaba groups to foolish remarks about sharia law and now to the failed Anglican Covenant it has all been confusion and chaos. The archbishop’s attempts to find middle ground on the issues tearing the communion apart – similar to the middle ground that he has had to find between his personal beliefs and those his office requires of him – were doomed to failure from the start because there is no middle ground.

We can only hope that his successor has what it takes to stand up for what is right and good in Anglicanism; even if he does, I fear it may be too late to undo the damage that has been wrought over the last nine years.

This is a reply to an article by John W Martens. For it to make sense, you should read his article first.

John,

Thank you for the response to my comments.

I attempted to post this reply to your article on your blog, but it seems that Blogger has a maximum of 4096 characters in the response box, so I have had to write my reply here. I didn’t want to do that since I thought it would create too much jumping around in the unlikely event that someone might want to read through the whole exchange.

I’ll start by returning to my suspicion that when Rowan Williams uses the word “miracle” he means something different to what I mean when I use it.

I am willing to go along with the plausibility of the idea that the transition from proto-humans to humans occurred when they became aware of a call from God. What eludes me is how this “call” could be anything other than supernatural.  If it was supernatural, it was outside nature and was an intervention in the normal processes of nature: it “tinkered” with nature. If it was not outside nature, yet still came from God, it means God himself is subject to his creation and its laws: he is a victim of its causal phenomena.

I’m not sure your saying:

“Williams is asking for us to see God as immanent and always present and always active in the processes of nature and being and not intervening from “the outside,” a trap into which I think David Jenkins falls.”

helps much in resolving that problem since God’s immanence and resulting activity in the processes of nature either has to be contained by nature and thus subject to it or not. If not, then it is still intervening from “the outside.”  From the confines of my “outside” trap, I would suggest that if you “den[y] the separation of God from nature” you teeter perilously close to a different trap: pantheism.

When Terry Nichols says “nature is not a closed system but an open system within a larger, divine context”, I think he is assisting my case, not yours. A system being “open”, implies that there is something outside the system which could influence it. When a door to my house opens, a breeze is likely to enter; if there is nothing outside my door – a vacuum – the reverse would happen. Either way, there has been intervention in my system. That is, unless Nichols wishes to render the same service for the word “open” as Williams seems to want to do for “miracle”: reduce it to unintelligibility.

Your use of the word “arbitrary” in relation to God’s action in the world puzzles me. Why would one assume that when God intervenes, it must be “arbitrary”? To say that implies action without thought – capricious as Rowan Williams puts it – a sort of divine flailing about. I presume you would admit that a human mind acts with a degree of free will in the universe? My intention in typing this sentence originates in an immaterial part of me – my mind or soul – and has physical results in the material world. If that is not arbitrary and capricious (I’m presuming on your generosity in granting me that it isn’t), why must God’s acting in the world be arbitrary and capricious? God is a person and, as such, must be able to act in the world to a much more sophisticated degree than the people who bear his image.

I would agree that “miracle” as defined by David Hume, a violation of the laws of nature, is something that Rowan Williams has an aversion to, but I would argue a few things: first that God’s acting in the universe does not necessarily violate the laws of nature any more than the acts of any immaterial free agents – human minds – do. The Hume objection only makes sense for an isolated or closed system: if the universe is not causally closed, the Hume definition doesn’t hold. Second, this type of objection is only relevant to a Newtonian view of the universe. Quantum Mechanics describes the universe as a system constrained by probabilities rather than laws. Bradley Monton (philosopher of religion and science) pointed out:

“I think that all miracles are pretty unproblematically compatible with the GWR [Ghiradi-Rimini-Weber] theory….. So for changing water into wine, it’s not a big deal – you’ve got a bunch of individual particles (electrons, protons etc.) that are composing the water, and they can all have GWR hits such that their positions are redistributed to the locations that would be appropriate for them to compose wine”.

That still would take God’s intervention, of course.

In conclusion then, I’ll repeat the definition of miracle that I made in one of my earlier comments: “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God.” I still think my saying that Rowan Williams’ remarks imply that he does not believe in miracles is justified on the grounds that he has redefined “miracle”: that is cheating. I would say the same for Christian thinkers who reason along the same lines.

The archbishops of atheism and Anglicanism have a polite chat in which Dawkins does a Bertrand Russell and declares he has really been an agnostic all along and Rowan says he doesn’t believe God “intervened” when humans came to be or, by implication, in miracles.

The event is actually billed as a “Dialogue” – a mini-indaba, no doubt – and will take place on February 23rd at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. That’s the same venue where Dawkins didn’t debate William Lane Craig.

The fact that Dawkins has agreed to this “Dialogue” is a measure of his confidence that he will make mincemeat out of Rowan Williams.

Judging by this clip, I suspect his confidence is not entirely misplaced:

My favourite part of this exchange comes at the point where Rowan tries to explain miracles, specifically the Virgin Birth:

Rowan: Here you have a long history of preparation for the coming of God in a new way, here you have a particular life, that of Mary opening itself up to the action of God in a certain way and then there is an opening. Something comes through, something fresh happens which is not – if you like – a suspension of the laws of nature but nature itself opening up to its own depths – something coming through.

Dawkins: I’m not sure what that means.

Rowan:  It’s poetic language.

It sounds to me more like a description of a cosmic bowel movement than “poetic language.”

From here:

A minister hit out at the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday for comparing City bankers to the rioters who tore apart Britain’s cities over the summer.

[….]

Dr Rowan Williams raised eyebrows on Sunday by saying the rioters were no worse than the bankers and that ‘bonds of trust’ had broken throughout society.

In his Christmas sermon, he said: ‘Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.’

There is one very minor difference that seems to have escaped Rowan Williams’ attention: for the moment, banking is legal whereas burning down someone else’s shop isn’t. This must be a concept too mundane to impinge on the atoms in Rowans’ brain ‘spinning apart in the dark.’