Rowan Williams was Archbishop of Canterbury when the Anglican Communion, the third largest Christian communion comprising over 85 million members across the world, was about to split over disagreements about, among other things, homosexuality.

In this two-part series of essays, written to fulfil the taught portions of the Master of Arts degree programme (2015) in Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK, I unpack some of Williams’ thinking.

In part one, I read virtually everything Williams has written about the topic and everything written about Williams’ theology, to understand his convictions and unpack the intractable (theological) controversy behind the North-South split in the Anglican Communion.

My supervisors Dr Jeremy Bonner and Professor Mike Higton were great: virtuosos in their fields of knowledge and helpful in their comments and guidance. Of the three sets of essays I had to research and write for the MA programme, these were the most engaging.

Sin and Homosexuality: An Exploration of Rowan Williams’ Theological Position

Rowan Williams’ tenure as the Archbishop of Canterbury was marked by the belief that the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which he was an honorary leader, was at the edge of dissolution. The causes are complex and may range from Anglicanism’s historic commitment to “latitudinarian” theological sympathies—which eventually produced the stripes of mutually dissenting Anglicans that one might witness in the world today—to the debates concerning the legitimacy of the Church of England’s legislative authority over other Provinces. The issue of the acceptability of ordaining practising homosexuals in the Episcopal Church in the United States, was also a point of contention, among others, that led representatives of the majority of Anglican Provinces, collectively called the Global South, to express concern over the theological legitimacy of their actions. [1] Williams himself has been noted for saying that committed homosexual relationships can ‘reflect the love of God’. [2] It is no wonder, then, that theologically conservative Anglicans have been dismayed with what they perceive to be the Communion’s increasing lack of commitment to biblical teachings. Accordingly, this essay wishes to form an account of Williams’ synoptic theology of sin to better understand his stand on this topic within that larger framework. It seeks to show how Williams’ epistemological apophatism undergirds his theological method and is therefore crucial to understanding the relevant aspects of his moral theology and biblical exegesis concerning homosexuality, homosexual acts, and same-sex marriage. For him, sin is not essentially a contravention of specific proscriptions but is, at its core, a ‘resentment towards pure gift’, and ‘the denial of [humanity’s] most basic creaturehood, a self-destructive assumption of a counterfeit divinity’. [3] Homosexual acts then, enacted in a monogamous and committed relationship, and fuelled by true self-giving desire, are the conditions in which Williams would say could ‘reflect the love of God’. [4]

In the foreword to a recent publication titled On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays, the influential Christian Ethicist Oliver O’Donovan has aptly written that Williams’ ‘reflective, poetic, and very dialectical conception of the theologian’s task is at some distance from the well-marshalled presentation of doctrines that a traditionally-schooled evangelical mind expects’. [5] Nevertheless, this essay will attempt a systematizing of his theology for its thesis, beginning with his exploration of Christian spirituality and articulation of the primacy of apophatism in one of his earliest publications, The Wound of Knowledge. [6] Throughout the history of Christian thought and literature, this relationship between reason and faith has been the topic of perennial debate, and Williams’ exploration of this theme takes him to two Church Fathers of the 4th century, one from the Greek East and the other from the Latin West: Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo. He writes that Gregory ‘refuses any ultimate privilege to the nous as such in the knowledge of God’, and though Augustine had put more stock into rationality in his early theology, he ‘moves further and further away from such a model as his thought matures’. Williams also notes that Augustine’s later ‘struggle with Pelagius […] drives him to state ever more sharply the helplessness of the human spirit’ in its apprehension of God and power to turn away from sin. Further on in his survey, weaving together the threads of his thought with the German Reformer Martin Luther’s theology of the cross, Williams articulates the value and primacy of apophatism in his theology:

God displays himself “visibly”, publicly and historically, only, as the humiliated and tortured Jesus, because men and women have perversely believed that their rationality can carry them speculatively into the invisible realm to divine truth. God overthrows speculative theology by making himself a worldly reality. […] God himself is the great “negative theologian”, who shatters all our images by addressing us in the cross of Jesus.

He concludes by writing that ‘Christianity begins in contradictions, in the painful effort to live with the baffling plurality and diversity of God’s manifested life – law and gospel, judgement and grace, the crucified Son crying to the Father’, and it is in ‘the intolerable contradictions of human suffering’, where pat answers are not provided, that one recognizes and relates with Christ, [7] and is therefore where any true knowledge of the divine issues.

In The Wound of Knowledge, Williams has offered a picture of theology as apophatic, and necessarily anchored on the free gift of Christ. These theological implications are spelled out in fuller detail in his more recent book On Christian Theology. In his prologue, he explores the distinct ‘celebratory, communicative, and critical styles’ of doing theology across history and argues that they should not be understood as fixed in a hierarchy, but are mobile, and are an ‘acknowledgement that the events of Jesus’ life and death open up schisms in any kind of language’. In his first chapter, he cautions against the modern tendency, of finite beings, to attempt ‘to take God’s point of view’ when they make theological claims, but concedes that this reservation raises the important question of where to ground ‘coherence in corporate Christian talk and action’. His second chapter on the “Unity of Christian Truth” addresses the question by first summarizing the theologian, Dietrich Ritschl’s account of two forwarded solutions: monothematic and encyclopaedic approaches to doing theology. [8] Williams then rejects them because they both ‘seek an essentially illusory permanence’, which is ‘incapable of responding to “prophetic interruption”’. [9] In his third chapter, Williams approaches an answer to this question by writing that ‘the Christian claim, then, is bound always to be something evolving and acquiring definition in the conversations of history: it offers a direction for historical construction of human meaning, but it does not offer to end history’. [10] The Australian theologians Andrew Moody and Benjamin Myers concur in their analysis of his theology. Moody notes that Williams’ ‘Christian apophatism’ logically entails that God is ‘wholly other’ who therefore can only be known in history. He goes on to write that ‘Christians only actually deal with God as they move beyond easy certainties and realize existentially […] that they know nothing of God’. Similarly, Myers notes that in William’s historical work, ‘orthodoxy always subverts its own finality; the comprehensiveness that it seeks is simply a holding-open of the community’s language toward its source-event, a radical resistance of any easy closure or final systematization’. [11]

The other vital piece of theology which complements and justifies Williams’ apophatism—the centrality of Christ—for him, also means that, when passing judgment, the Church will always itself also be under judgment by Christ. He recognizes that the Church’s distinctive role in the world is to ‘transform [it] by communicating to it in word and act a truthfulness that exposes the deepest human fears and evasions and makes possible the kind of human existence that can pass beyond these fears to a new liberty’. He notes that the Church which judges the world with esoteric‘ Christian interpretive categories’ rather than on the kind of exemplary life its adherents lead, will also hear ‘God’s judgement on itself in the judgement passed on it by the world’. He writes that Christ’s resurrection, which is the raising of ‘the new life from a moral and material nothing, is judgement upon the attempt to construct a system of action and understanding so impregnable that it cannot live with prophetic criticism’. The Australian theologian Michael Jensen affirms Williams’ conviction that the Church, being constituted by ‘finite and fallible creatures necessitates that [they] humbly open [them]selves […] to stand in the position of the one who is judged’. [12] In the same vein, Williams notes that just judgement supposes full knowledge, which humans do not have: ‘the inner sphere belongs to God’s judgement and is not available. What is available is action: judged not according to how it serves to secure a position before God and others, but according to its fidelity to the character of God’. [13] And ascertaining this fidelity is fallible since it is not based on works.

The preceding survey of selective aspects of Williams’ theology has revealed his apophatic theological epistemology anchored on the self-revelation and judgement of Christ and the ongoing history of the Church, which legitimizes his injunction for it to be cautious when making theological pronouncements and judgements. This essay will presently explore his understanding of sin within this framework before moving on to provide an account of his stand on homosexuality, homosexual acts, and same-sex marriage.

One significant implication of William’s theological epistemology is that rational inquiry cannot bring the inquirer closer to theological truths. If, however, the rational cannot play an important role in Williams’ theology, where can he ground theological truth? He answers that it must be grounded in humanity’s reconciled relationship with Christ, won through Christ, which, being partially analogous to the relationship within the Trinity, therefore allows the believer to enjoy ‘the divine relation of Son to Father,’ and share ‘in the divine life’. He marshals support from 2nd and 4th century Greek Church Fathers Irenaeus and Athanasius, arguing that the former’s battle against the Gnostics and the latter’s doctrine of “deification”—which he interprets as relational rather than ontological—both reflect that the ‘goal of Christian growth is a knowledge of God entirely founded in a sharing of life, an intimacy between persons, the fellowship of God with human beings in their humanness’. [14] In On Christian Theology, he shows how this informs one important facet of his understanding of sin, as ‘a buried capacity for communion between human beings’. This then informs his articulation of—for an Anglican Archbishop—a rather low ecclesiology:

the Church claims to show the human world as such what is possible for it in relation to God – not through the adding of ecclesiastical activities to others, and not through the sacralising of existing communal forms, but by witnessing to the possibility of a common life sustained by God’s creative breaking of existing frontiers and showing that creative authority in the pattern of relation already described, the building up of Christ-like persons. [15]

In the Australian theologian Rhys Bezzant’s article on Williams’ Trinitarian ecclesiology, he connects his privileging of the renewed divine-human relationship attained through the incarnation [16] as a reflection of the ‘communal existence of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. [17]

This focus on Trinitarian analogies of relation flows into his theological reflection on creation. This allows him to connect the notion of the eternal self-giving nature of the Trinity with the view of creation ex nihilo as pure gift. He makes it clear that he is not a Pantheist or a Panentheist, that is to say, someone who believes, with varying nuance, that creation is identical to God or a part of God. [18] In his chapter “On Being Creatures”, he writes that there was a movement in Jewish and Christian thought concerning creation that evolved from the notion that God-shaped pre-existing material to creation ex nihilo. [19] These have two relevant implications. The first is that the ‘the overcoming of “nature” as a proper goal for spirituality is highly problematic: we need a very careful theory of how nature is distorted or obscured before this language is remotely possible; an account, in effect, of how we mistake the unnatural for the natural’. The second is that the ‘intrinsic self-love and self-gift’ of the Trinity ‘establishes that creation, while not “needed” by God, is wholly in accord with the divine being as being-for-another’. [20] Concerning the second, creation is therefore a generous and good gift of God not meant to fill a lack in himself. The Australian theologian Byron Smith writes that for Williams, ‘spirituality as a way of life’ informed by creation ex nihilo means that it ‘is to be shared, since it is based on God’s generosity […] unmitigated by our failure, need, limit or difference’. This leads to the formulation of the first definition of sin in this essay’s thesis, as ‘resentment towards pure gift’ manifested by creation’s refusal to relate to and share generously with the rest of creation. [21]

In order to reach the second definition, this concept of the goodness of nature has to be tied in with Williams’ understanding of what it means to be a creature. He writes that since creation is from nothing and given by the grace and love rather than the authority of God, all of it is originally good; nature and God are not locked in some kind of zero-sum game vying for human allegiance. Rather, since he has given nature, and humanity in it, freely and generously, this means that a robust theological understanding of what it means to be human is to embrace one’s ‘being-in-the-world’. He writes that ‘the contemplative process is ultimately a reconciliation with, not an alienation from, creatureliness, from the life of the body in time’. [22] Smith, in his article on “The Humanity of Godliness”, writes that ‘God is first and foremost a generous giver of life and breath, rather than a controlling monarch making demands’. Therefore ‘the state of creatureliness is not the background against which the deeper spiritual truths stand in contrast, but the irreplaceable foundation of true Christian living and experience’ because creation’s inherent finitude and inter-dependence necessitates sharing and generosity, which encourages spiritual maturity. Sin is then understood to be ‘a self-destructive assumption of counterfeit divinity’, when, in human rejection of its created-ness through the generosity of God, it ‘compensate[s] through depriving others’. Within this framework, Original Sin is not understood as innate depravity, but being ‘born into a world where there is already a history of oppression and victimization’, a picture of the world that has already internalised ‘the system of oppressor-victim’. He writes that it is this ‘“already” which theology (sometimes rather unhelpfully) refers to as original sin—the sense of a primordial “dimunition” from which we all suffer before ever we are capable of understanding or choice’. [23]

So far then, this essay has endeavoured to show that for Williams, theological knowledge concerning sin must be understood within the framework of the self-giving relationship within the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, the gift of the Incarnation, which connects the two, and the cross, which renders all humanity perennially open to judgement. Sin therefore results from humanity’s rejection of its inherent finitude by claiming final knowledge (including theological) and giving into worldliness by adopting its competitive framework, hoarding resources, and depriving others. With that in mind, this essay will now move on to his thoughts on homosexuality, homosexual acts and same-sex marriage.

In his chapter “Interiority and Epiphany: a reading of New Testament Ethics” in his book On Christian Theology, Williams argues that the Christian is able to make moral decisions in finite creatureliness by recognizing that she is adjudicated by a loving presence who is not finite, and who ‘provides a ground for discourse about our human negotiation that is not immediately trapped in rivalry: a common discourse before a common other, to which I and the other are alike vulnerable or responsible’. He approvingly quotes from the philosopher René Girard who wrote that ‘the Gospels deprive God of his most essential role in primitive religions – that of polarizing everything mankind does not succeed in mastering, particularly in relationships between individuals’. [24] Consequently, in his article “Knowing Myself in Christ,” his response to the “St AndrewsDay Statement”, which is a statement ‘produced by a group of theologians at the fevered conflict over homosexuality gripping the Church’ in 1995, [25] he asks if homosexual desire fits into the statement’s understanding of sin (an understanding which he accepts): ‘is it always and necessarily a desire comparable to the desire for many sexual partners or for sexual gratification at someone else’s expense?’ He also questions the part of the statement which, taking the first chapter of Romans into account, concurred that homosexual orientation is somehow rooted in rebellion against God. This implies that ‘their sexual orientation must in some way be rooted in error’. Williams notes that there are genuine homosexual Christians who do ‘not see their condition as a mark of rebellion or confusion’, and concerning the passage in Romans, 1.26-27, the only instance in scripture which he sees as providing any warrant for condemning homosexual behaviour, he fails to see how one can know for certain that homosexual acts are de facto ‘cast as a self-conscious flouting of a truth already made known’. He goes on to say:

If the Church is to “give constant encouragement in following Christ” even to those who do not settle for either celibacy or marriage because of their orientation, can it really and honestly do so without at least admitting that an account of homosexual identity dominated by Romans 1 cannot be the whole story? [26]

In his address to Christ College, Cambridge in 1996 titled “Forbidden Fruit: New Testament Sexual Ethics”, he refuses to make the easy connection between contemporary forms of homosexual relations and scriptural ones: ‘it looks as if the jury is still out on the question of whether some kinds of homosexual relation are effectively of the same kind as the relations between the sexes that Paul outlines, to the degree that this might outweigh Paul’s denunciation of the prevailing homosexual life-styles of his own day’. [27] For him, as the Australian theologian Andrew Cameron points out in his analysis of “The Body’s Grace”, which is analogous to Williams’ belief that God’s gift of creation ex nihilo does not serve an instrumental cause, same-sex love may even be very good, and may reflect the love of God, because it does not serve an instrumental cause either (i.e., procreation). [28]

These raise the important question: How would Williams defend this view scripturally? Concerning method, Jenson notes that William’s historical critical study of the scriptures has shown him that ‘the inarticulacy and disagreements of the first Christians give us hope that our meagre efforts at talking about God are not primarily futile, whatever their own inadequacy. The canon of Scripture itself serves to hold open the need for review, development, and self-criticism—this is what it means to be under the authority of scripture’. [29] In his speech at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, he argues that the Old Testament laws were given in the context of a relationship, and the harshest punishments meted out on the Israelites were ones that contravened that relationship through idolatry and economic oppression. He emphasizes that it is the relationship rather than the laws that characterize the Israelites’ encounter with God. [30] Similarly, he argues that the New Testament advocates methods of moral thinking based on Christ’s act of reconciliation rather than simply providing axiomatic conclusions. He writes that this thinking is done through a contemporary identification and re-appropriation of humanity in the Christian story, that is, ‘an active working through of the story’s movement in our own time’. [31] Mike Higton uses William’s approach in Pauline interpretation to provide a clear example of what he means. Concerning the Corinthian concern for whether or not eating food sacrificed to idols is lawful, he writes that Paul would try to show that his readers already know how they should decide based ‘on the foundation of Good News’ [32] that they have already received, identified with, and are living under, before providing them with his answers. Therefore, in William’s interpretive method, Paul’s answers are not meant to be understood as binding on all Christians in all times and circumstances based arbitrarily on his authority but should be understood as providing an example of how decisions concerning Christian action in the world must be ‘mediated by processes of thinking about the gospel’, rather than on ad hoc prohibition. [33]

The one problem that remains is scripture’s seeming endorsement of the instrumental function of marriage for procreation, [34] and the consequent definitional necessitation of a male-female pair. [35] Williams rejects this view. Cameron writes that, for Williams, ‘the biblical presentation of marriage is not contingent upon procreation’, and that the related definitional exclusivity of male-female marriage is ‘anti-theological and abstract because they defer to constructions extraneous to theology, such as gender complementarity and natural law’. [36] Furthermore for Williams,

if what is symbolically central in the scriptural view of marriage, in Old and New Testaments, is not an arrangement for procreation but a condition of living “under promise”, living in commitment usque ad mortem […] crucis, then the partnership of two persons of the same sex is in some way “showing” what marriage shows of the God who promises and who remains faithful. [37]

He goes on to say that sex in the New Testament, is not portrayed by Jesus or Paul as ‘irrational or vulgar’, but becomes problematic because ‘certain kinds of bonds will be too all-consuming for at least some of the citizens of God’s kingdom’. Furthermore, he argues that any fundamentalist interpretation of the teachings of sexuality in the New Testament is anachronistic because they do not take into account the fact that the social and cultural world recorded in it did not classify sexuality in the same way contemporary people would and made prohibitions and stipulations based on the circumstances and assumptions of their time, assumptions that moderns do not share. Therefore, for him, what perverts sex, taking I Corinthians 7 and Ephesians into account, is unequal sexual partnership represented by ‘power exercised by one person trying to define the other’. [38] Given his approach to sexual ethics within the framework of his understanding of sin, which is built up from his apophatic theological epistemology, leading him to affirm the relational approach to knowing Christ’s love and judgement through the self-giving nature of the Trinity and the pure gift of creation, homosexual behaviour among individuals who are homosexually oriented, and enacted in a committed monogamous relationship, though not necessarily publicly ratified, [39] characterised not by a power struggle but by true self-giving desire, can indeed, he argues, reflect a sharing in God’s self-giving, relational love in Christ.

Williams’ views on homosexuality, homosexual acts, and same-sex marriage, have been rejected by conservative Anglicans in the Global South and some conservative groups from within the Church of England, even though, since the end of March 2014, ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury [Justin Welby] has signalled that the Church of England will mount no more resistance to gay marriage among churchgoers’. [40] Over the past two decades, these differences in theological opinion have led to mutual dissatisfaction on both sides of the divide. On one occasion, several bishops who were distressed by the election of an openly homosexual bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States boycotted the Lambeth Conference in 2008 and attended instead the alternative Global Anglican Futures Conference which was convened in Jerusalem. [41] Nevertheless, built into Williams’ understanding of theological knowledge is that notion of uncertainty and the relational nature of genuine embodied existence, which leads to his belief in the necessity of communal discernment in the Church over theological matters. [42] He concedes that scripture does not provide easy answers, it requires an interpretive method consisting of ‘a complex of interwoven processes: a production of meaning in the only mode available for material and temporal creatures’. [43] And this will necessarily produce disagreements among sincere Christians. [44] His solution, in imitation of the self-giving love of God, is a call for Christians ‘to turn away from the temptation to seek purity and assurance of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided’. [45] If the one unifying ethos of historic Anglicanism has been its “latitudinarian” sympathies and varied range of theological expression across time and space, then Williams’ commitment to bearing the burdens of a hopelessly divided Communion and asking others to do the same, despite his theological disagreements, reveals his quintessential Anglican-ness. [46] Having laid the groundwork for understanding Rowan Williams’ theology concerning sin and homosexuality, the summative assignment following will then offer an evaluation of his views from a conservative perspective.

Endnotes

1. Pat Ashworth, ‘Signatories of Akinola letter say they didn’t sign’, The Church Times, in Virtue Online, 26 November 2005
2. Riazat Butt, ‘Rowan Williams: gay couples reflect the love of God’, in The Guardian, 7 August 2008
3. Byron Smith, ‘The Humanity of Godliness: Spirituality and Creatureliness in Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 117, 136.
4. Butt, ‘Rowan Williams’.
5. Oliver O’Donovon, ‘Foreword: Australia on Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), p. x.
6. Williams quotes approvingly from these historical theologians.
7. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge(London: Darton Longman Todd, 1979),pp. 61, 74, 74, 149, 182. Williams cites I Corinthians 2.2, 5 as his closing statement for the book: ‘I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified […] that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God’.
8. Monothematic theologies are united in their being ‘bound to a single focal theme or doctrinal nexus’, while encyclopaedic theologies ‘claim to produce a map of the whole territory, displaying an ordered relation between topics’, Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 17, 18.
9. Dietrich Ritschl, The Logic of Theology(London, 1986),p. 92.
10. Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. xiii, xvi, 6, 17, 19, 36.
11. Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 26, 28, 41,62.
12. O’Donovan, ‘Foreword’, pp. xvii, xvii.
13. Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 31, 39, 271, 264.
14. Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, pp. 51, 30.
15. Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 230, 233.
16. The implication would be that ‘the death of Christ would typically be presented in Abélardian fashion as an example or type, rather than in Anselmian categories of satisfaction and honor’, Rhys Bezzant, ‘The Ecclesiology of Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), p. 12.
17. Bezzant, ‘The Ecclesiology of Rowan Williams’, p. 23.
18. See Russell, On Rowan Williams, p. 119; and Williams, On Christian Theology, p. 63. He argues that Panentheism is ‘creation centred spirituality’, which ‘begins […] with the theme of original blessing rather than original sin’, quoting from Gordon Wakefield, Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (London, 1983), p. 99.
19. He notes that creation ex nihilo was a distinctively Jewish and Christian idea and that the first real articulations of this language can be found on Second Isaiah’s typological references to Exodus in his proclamation of the Jewish people’s deliverance from Babylonian exile based on God’s call, a call from nothing to become something: ‘More and more, creation is seen as performed by the free utterance of God along; the imagery of moulding something out of something else recedes’, Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 67-68.
20. Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 74-75,64, 68, 69, 74.
21. Smith, ‘The Humanity of Godliness’, pp. 116, 118, 117.
22. Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 73,12.
23. Smith, ‘The Humanity of Godliness’, pp. 118, 118-119,130, 136, 124, 124, 124; Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Christian Gospel (London: Darton, Longman Todd, 1980), p. 18.
24. René Girard, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World(Athlone Press, 1987), p. 185; Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 244, 248.
25. “Introduction”, in Timothy Bradshaw, ed., The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), p. 1.
26. Rowan Williams, ‘Knowing Myself in Christ’, in Timothy Bradshaw, ed., The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), pp. 14, 15, 17, 16, 18.
27. Rowan Williams, ‘New Testament Sexual Ethics’, in Martyn Percy, ed., Intimate Affairs: Sexuality & Spirituality in Perspective (London: Darton Longman Todd, 1997), p. 30.
28. Andrew Cameron, ‘Desire and Grace: Rowan Williams and the Search for Bodily Wholeness’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 142
29. Michael Jensen, ‘Krisis? Kritik?: Judgement and Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), p. 74.
30. Rowan Williams, ‘Making Moral Decisions’, in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 6.
31. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, p. 50.
32. The scripture references are taken from I Corinthians 8.8 and 10.
33. Mike Higton, Deciding Differently, Rowan Williams’ Theology of Moral-Decision Making (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2011), p. 12, 13.
34. See Genesis 1.18.
35. See Matthew 19.4-6.
36. Cameron, ‘Desire and Grace’, pp. 152, 148.
37. Williams, ‘Knowing Myself in Christ’, pp. 18-19.
38. ‘If God acts for us by letting go of a divine power that is abstract and unilateral and comes in Jesus’ life to set us free for working with Jesus and praying with Jesus, this suggests strongly that a sexual partnership that is unequal, that represents power exercised by one person trying to define the other, would fail to be part of an integrated Christian life’, Williams, ‘New Testament Sexual Ethics’, p. 28.
39. Rowan Williams, ‘New Testament Sexual Ethics’, pp. 25, 24, 27-28 30.
40. See Andrew Brown, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury signal send of C of E’s resistance to gay marriage’, in The Guardian , 27 March 2014
41. Christopher Craig Brittain and Andrew McKinnon, ‘Homosexuality and the Construction of “Anglican Orthodoxy”: The Symbolic Politics of the Anglican Communion’, Sociology of Religion, (2011), 1–3.
42. See Higton, ‘Deciding Differently’, p. 23; Smith, ‘The Humanity of Godliness’, p. 132.
43. Williams, On Christian Theology, p. 55.
44. He would define sincerity as whether or not the Christians in question possess a ‘grammar of obedience’, that is, a willingness to be ‘dispossessed by the truth they are engaging with’, Williams, On Christian Theology, p 11. This is where Williams would draw the inclusive line.
45. Williams, ‘Making Moral Decisions’, p. 11.
46. In his introduction to Anglican Identities, Williams writes that the common denominator among the Anglican theologians he discusses in his book is their defence of ‘a theologically informed and spiritually sustained patience’, Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (London: Darton, Longman Todd, 2004), p. 7.

Bibliography

• Ashworth, Pat, ‘Signatories of Akinola letter say they didn’t sign’, The Church Times, in Virtue Online, 26 November 2005
• Bezzant, Rhys, ‘The Ecclesiology of Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 1-24
• Brittain, Christopher Craig, and Andrew McKinnon, ‘Homosexuality and the Construction of “Anglican Orthodoxy”: The Symbolic Politics of the Anglican Communion’, Sociology of Religion, (2011), 1–3.
• Cameron, Andrew, ‘Desire and Grace: Rowan Williams and the Search for Bodily Wholeness’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 141-162
• Girard, René, Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World (Athlone Press, 1987)
• Higton, Mike, Deciding Differently, Rowan Williams’ Theology of Moral-Decision Making (Cambridge: Grove Books, 2011)
• Jenson, Michael, ‘Krisis? Kritik?: Judgement and Jesus in the Theology of Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 68-84
• Moody, Andrew, ‘The Hidden Center: Trinity and Incarnation in the Negative (and Positive) Theology of Rowan Williams’, in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), pp. 25-46
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• Ritschl, Dietrich, The Logic of Theology (London, 1986)
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• Wakefield, Gordon, Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (London, 1983)
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• ———, ‘Knowing Myself in Christ’, in Timothy Bradshaw, ed., The Way Forward? Christian Voices on Homosexuality and the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), pp. 12-19
• ———, ‘Making Moral Decisions’, in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 3-15
• ———, ‘New Testament Sexual Ethics’, in Martyn Percy, ed., Intimate Affairs: Sexuality & Spirituality in Perspective (London: Darton Longman Todd, 1997), pp. 21-31
• ———, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000)
• ———, Resurrection: Interpreting the Christian Gospel (London: Darton, Longman Todd, 1980)
• ———, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton Longman Todd, 1979)