Anglican Identities [Paperback]

Amidst all the furor in the last year and a half concerning whether or not the Anglican Communion was - and is - likely to last, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, released this collection of essays on Anglicanism/s in hopes that "these 'identities' may allow and encourage for some readers a pause for mind and feeling to be reintroduced to 'passionate patience.'" (pp. 7 & 8) What follows these closing remarks in the introduction are not just 8 chapters devoted to different Anglican thinkers; instead, along with his historical investigations are a number of theological illuminations that are, quite simply, brilliant:

"Doctrine is about our end (and our beginning); about what in our humanity is not negotiable, dispensable, vulnerable to revision according to political convenience or cultural chance and fashion. Deny this, and you must say that humanity or the human good is, in some significant way, within our power to determine: which may sound emancipatory for a few minutes, until you remember that, in a violent and oppressive world, it is neither good news nor good sense to propose that definitions of the human lie in human hands, when those hands are by no means guaranteed to be the instruments of a mind formed by contemplative reason - or even what passes for reason in the liberal and universalist ethos of 'our' democracies."

- p. 55

"...theological language is a difficult, always incomplete, corruptible, but unavoidable enterprise, pressed into existence by the particular character of what God is perceived as doing, by the sense of a givenness or gratuity bearing on the human situation in such a way that a difference is made that demands new words and concepts."

- p. 108

What Williams most seeks to do here - as in other places - is to enter into a charitable dialogue with some of the important - even if not necessarily great - Anglican voices of the past. This charitable dialogue is not without criticism at points; but equally, it is not without appreciation. Reading Williams reading others is like watching someone look into a photo album and pull out all sorts of interesting bits about *us* and where we are at today by noticing the style of bicycle that the child in the photo is riding or the type of dress that a woman is wearing *then*. This is a book to go back through more than once.

There are eight chapters in the book:

1. Williams Tyndale (1491 - 1536): The Christian Society

2. Richard Hooker (1554 - 1600): Contemplative Pragmatism

3. Richard Hooker (1554 - 1600): Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary

4. George Herbert (1593 - 1633): Inside Herbert's Afflictions

5. B.F. Westcott (1825 - 1901): The Fate of Liberal Anglicanism

6. Michael Ramsey (1904 - 1988): Theology and the Churches

7. John A. T. Robinson (1919 - 1983): Honest to God and the 1960s

8. B.F. Westcott (1825 - 1901), E.C. Hoskyns (1884 - 1937), William Temple (1881 - 1944) and John A.T. Robinson(1919 - 1983): Anglican Approaches to St. John's Gospel

Williams is quite aware that this is by no means a complete list of the manifold Anglican identities that have existed and continue to exist in our world. Yet, there are a lot of contours and trajectories here that ought not be missed and can, in fact, be found to emerge as one goes through different Anglican thinkers.

As one may notice in the above list of chapters, Richard Hooker - perhaps rightly thought of as the theological father of all later Anglican writers - makes *two* appearances here. Williams writes that "Hooker - like the Anglican tradition as a whole, it is tempting to add - is tantalizingly hard to pigeonhole." (p. 55) Yet, I wonder if perhaps this is only because we have become too used to hearing a polemic between radical Protestants on the one hand and ardent Roman Catholics on the other - as if this truly represented the spectrum of Christendom! Anglicanism, as an attempting *for* a primitive (= historic!) catholicity, deconstructs the oftentimes elaborate over-simplifications made by both Puritans and Roman Catholics on issues such as Scripture, grace and the Church, therefore standing as a viable third option: as something *distinctly* Anglican.

Highly recommended.