Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury
by Rupert Shortt
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 466 pages
$30.00

Not long ago, the only thing I knew about Rowan Williams was that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury and that he was often portrayed as a somewhat forlorn, pitiable figure caught in the crossfire of a potential schism in the Anglican Communion, never able to see his liberal, revisionist agenda for the church take root. Then one day, on the short train ride from Durham, England to Edinburgh, I decided to read one of his books. I chose Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief. Originally given as talks at Canterbury Cathedral during Holy Week of 2005 and published in 2007, this slim book’s aim is to clarify for the curious—both skeptical and believing—what the historic Christian faith amounts to. It drew me in immediately. Here’s a sample, taken from a section where Williams explicates “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” a phrase of the Apostles’ Creed, an ancient and still-revered affirmation of faith:

The resurrection is in part about the sheer toughness and persistence of God’s love. When we have done our worst, God remains God—and remains committed to being our God. God was God even while God in human flesh was dying in anguish on the cross; God is God now in the new life of Jesus raised from death…. The resurrection displays God’s triumphant love as still and for ever having the shape of Jesus. And this is why it won’t do to reduce the resurrection to something that was going on inside the heads of the disciples. If we go down that road, we lose sight of the conviction that seems so basic in the Bible, that the disciples meet a risen Jesus who is still doing what he always did, making God present in his actual presence, his voice and touch. I don’t see how we can say all that without taking seriously what the New Testament says about the tomb being empty on Easter Day.

By the time I got off my train in Scotland, I’d finished most of Tokens of Trust and was already wondering which book of Williams’ I should turn to next. I was hooked. 

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In 2002 Rowan Williams was elected the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Church of England and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, a body of Christian churches—at 80 million, the largest Christian body after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches—which traces its spiritual lineage to the Church of England. Aside from the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury may be the most widely recognized Christian leader in the world.

For those readers wishing to know more about the man behind the title, there is now an excellent biography of Rowan Williams, newly published and authored by the religion editor of London’s Times Literary Supplement—Rupert Shortt’s Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Beginning with Williams’ birth in the Welsh village of Ystradgynlais, Shortt covers all the high points of Williams’ early life: his precocious childhood and self-guided conversion to Anglicanism from Presbyterianism at 10 years old; his schoolboy fascination with Russian novels, Welsh, poetry, and drama; his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge and as a doctoral candidate at Oxford, where he studied Russian Orthodox theology. Moving chronologically, Shortt’s book slows down as his subject matures, spending ample time discussing Williams’ ordination to the Anglican priesthood; the writing of his first book, The Wound of Knowledge, at 29 years old; his marriage to Jane Paul, whom he had met at Cambridge; not least important, his enjoyment of The Simpsons (an affinity I’d heard about from a friend of Williams’ to whom he had recommended the show); his becoming Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious chairs; and his subsequent exit from academia to become bishop of Monmouth—a return to his native Wales—and ultimately Archbishop of Wales.

Shortt’s book is written in the punchy, readable style of the highbrow news magazine. It’s nearly 500 pages, but you hardly notice: the print is large, the margins wide. Its editorial verve, however, was my biggest hurdle to unqualified admiration of the biography. Like all journalists, Shortt clearly has an angle: For him, Williams is a voice for progress crying in the wilderness of a dying age. After detailing Williams’ childhood and time at Cambridge and Oxford and in Wales, the book shifts in its latter half to focus on Williams’ experience in the seat of Canterbury. Dominating this account are two recurring themes: Williams’ frustrated attempts to guide the church to a more open-minded position on same-sex relationships and the opposition he faced (and faces) in the effort from conservative evangelicals.

Shortt portrays Williams as “a leader with sane views about sex.” He praises an address Williams delivered in 1989 to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement for including “a forthright defence [sic] of sex outside marriage in some cases.” And he sees Williams’ position on the place of same-sex partnerships in the Anglican Communion as a harbinger of a future widespread liberation for a much-maligned minority group. On the other hand, when discussing the parts of the Anglican Communion that take exception to some of Williams’ positions, Shortt leaves little doubt where his sympathies lie. One of his paragraphs begins this way: “A further sense of how some Evangelicals had poisoned the wells for the Archbishop came in early October….” Another starts like this: “The fire-breathers of the Right were more scornful still.” It’s clear who the good guys and bad guys are in this tale.

(Judging by the usage heard on CNN, “evangelical” in the U.S. tends to refer to a Christian with right-wing political views. But “evangelical” functions a bit differently in the U.K. Within Anglicanism, the term usually designates the low-church wing of the Anglican Communion with conservative views of the nature of the Bible’s authority for contemporary faith and practice, alongside the more liberal Anglo-Catholic wing of the Communion which is more sanguine about modern rereadings of the Bible and more committed to a high-church form of worship. Neither group would have much sympathy, it seems, for the right-of-center political causes with which U.S. evangelicals have identified themselves.)

But, perhaps because my introduction to Rowan Williams came through Tokens of Trust, Shortt’s portrait doesn’t quite ring true to me. I am not convinced that Williams can be so easily enlisted in the project of reforming Anglicanism to align with contemporary concerns—a freer sexual ethic, a sloughing off of outmoded political views. “Williams has been presented to the public as so much more left-wing a figure than those who know him have ever taken him for,” wrote Oliver O’Donovan, a former Oxford colleague of Williams, in the early days after Williams’ confirmation as Archbishop. “He is a man it has proved easy for almost everyone to love,” O’Donovan continued, “and not the least ardent are the conservative evangelicals, a point studiously ignored by the media.” Although Shortt quotes from the same article of O’Donovan’s from which I drew these excerpts, he omits these, inadvertently underscoring O’Donovan’s point.

It’s highly doubtful Williams would welcome being labeled “conservative,” though, and, in any case, it’s not my aim to recover his reputation. But I am concerned, when I read a biography, to know the extent to which it tries to reflect the priorities, goals, and activities of its subject, and to what degree it’s part of the author’s project to enlist a well-known figure in some cause the author considers worth championing.

Since reading Tokens of Trust, I’ve made it a point to read more of Williams’ many books, to listen to his talks and frequent his website. As a result, I’ve glimpsed less a figure shaped by an agenda mirroring late modernity’s own and more of a pastor attempting to take his cues from Christianity’s founding documents and traditions. Likewise, many of the evangelicals I know are avid readers of Williams and find much to praise in the way he is trying to steer the Anglican Communion through treacherous waters and avoid schism, without pushing churches to accept his own views on, say, same-sex unions. People like this—and I take my friends as representative—get short shrift in Rowan’s Rule, and that seems unfortunate to me. Although I’ll be returning to Shortt’s biography for its wealth of fascinating detail about a man I deeply admire, I’ll continue to be skeptical of its explanation of what makes Rowan Williams tick. For that explanation, I expect I’ll go back to get it from the horse’s mouth; I’ll keep reading Williams first and the media second.

Wesley Hill has an MA in Theology and Religion from Durham University.