Editorial Archbishop of Canterbury

Home , Archbishop of York, Bishop of Durham, George Carey, Justin Welby, Low church, Michael Ramsey

ecclesiology 12 (2016) 273-277 ECCLESIOLOGY

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Paul Avis University of Exeter, uk [email protected]

One way in which the comprehensiveness of the Church of England, as a church both catholic and reformed, has been both represented and secured in recent times is by alternating Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic (or ‘Catholic An- glican’, as we sometimes say now) Archbishops of Canterbury. We trust that the Crown Nominations Commission (a commission of the General Synod) has selected the candidates on their overall merits, not merely because they came from a different stable to their predecessors. But it seems not unreasonable to suggest that one of the possible ‘merits’ to be taken into consideration is their ability to balance (or rebalance) the Church of England as a comprehensive church. Thus the current incumbent, Justin Welby (Evangelical), succeeded Rowan Williams (Anglo-Catholic), who succeeded George Carey (Evangeli- cal), who succeeded Robert Runcie (Anglo-Catholic), who succeeded Donald Coggan (Evangelical), who succeeded Michael Ramsey (Anglo-Catholic), who succeeded Geoffrey Fisher (Low Church, though not Evangelical), who succeeded Cosmo Lang (Anglo-Catholic), who succeeded Randall Davidson (High to Broad Church). Let me qualify this rather bald proposition about the alternating church- manships of the archbishops in three ways. First, of course it is the churches of the Anglican Communion (thirty-eight ‘provinces’) that are properly described – and would describe themselves – as catholic and reformed, not merely the Church of England itself, but historically most of the churches of the Communion have taken their ecclesial tone from the Church of England. (I attempted a brief analysis of what might be meant by ‘catholic and reformed’ in my previous Editorial, 12.2.) Secondly, I say that an archbishop ‘succeeded’, rather than merely ‘followed’ his predecessor, for obvious ecclesiological

274 Avis reasons: succession of bishops in a See, teaching, sanctifying (through the sacraments) and governing the faithful in his or her diocese, is a key aspect of the apostolicity of a church and of its ministry and is the deepest and per- haps the most acceptable meaning of the term (neuralgic to some) ‘apostolic succession’. And, thirdly, when I designate an Archbishop ‘Anglo-Catholic’ or ‘Evangelical’, that is simply shorthand, and is not meant to imply that that is all they were or that their ‘churchmanship’ and spirituality could be reduced to such a ‘party’ label. They have almost all transcended those categories. One twentieth-century archbishop who burst the mould was Michael Ramsey (1904–1988), now the subject of a fresh study. Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974, having previously held office as Sub-Dean of Lincoln Theological College, Van Mildert Canon Professor of Divinity at Durham, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York. Ramsey’s reputation is of a saintly, scholarly, vague, eccentric, contemplative and politically ineffectual figure. Certainly, he was not normal. He had no small talk and was one who lived ‘as seeing the invisible’. The Celtic saints and the Venerable Bede were to him like contemporaries.1 Webster claims, convincingly, that the communion of saints was the key to his thought (p. 16). There were difficult silences in conversation, but his eyebrows were eloquent and he would lift his arms up over his head at times of deep feeling. He wept in the chair of the General Synod when the unity proposals between the Church of England and the Methodist Church finally failed in 1972. Stories of Ramsey’s absent-mindedness are legion. When some wanted to block his preferment to high office they put it about that he had been known to change his trousers in the middle of a cathedral proces- sion. This was thought not totally implausible, though it was more likely that he had wandered off in the wrong direction, completely absorbed in all the holy, historical representations and associations of the building. Ramsey has remained rather an enigma and Owen Chadwick’s otherwise distinguished bi- ography does not help in this respect because Chadwick really fails to bring out exactly why the young Michael Ramsey received meteoric advancement, academic and ecclesiastical.2 As we get to know him more intimately, however, we gain a sense of what an extraordinary human being, priest and bishop he was: holy and prayerful; luminously intelligent and formidably learned; kind, caring and humorous; courageous, indeed fearless. What does it matter that in his inner life he was ‘on another planet’?

1 For a moving – and hilarious – fund of reminiscences of Ramsey before he went to Canter- bury, see Rosalind Brown (ed.), Ramsey Remembered (Durham: Durham Cathedral, 2010). 2 Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

ecclesiology 12 (2016) 273-277