Paul Avis reviews Archbishop Ramsey

I’m very pleased to be able to point out another favourable review of my book on Michael Ramsey, this time from the Anglican priest and ecclesiologist Paul Avis, visiting professor in the University of Exeter. Editor of the journal Ecclesiology, Avis devotes his whole editorial for volume 12, issue 3 to the book, and Ramsey at large.

Avis’s piece is more than simply a review, and is worth reading in its own right for his remarks on Ramsey, Luther and the Cross. He also notes Ramsey’s much noted personal eccentricity, which I have suggested that this could be explained by a retrospective diagnosis of autism. However, his observations on my book are uniformly positive.

Webster’s study is marked by well-paced narrative, perceptive analysis [and] a few correctives to [Owen] Chadwick’s picture…  Altogether Ramsey emerges as an impressively capable and indeed prophetic Archbishop of Canterbury. Like the other excellent recent reappraisals of Archbishops of Canterbury […] this new study shows an Archbishop of Canterbury of greater stature, especially in this case politically, than many have previously thought. Ramsey was perhaps overall the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury of the twentieth century’

It is published by Routledge at £25 in paperback; read other reviews of it here.

On structuring a book

Another review of my book on Michael Ramsey appears this week, this time from Keith Robbins in the English Historical Review. It is of course a pleasure to have a review from a senior scholar such as Professor Robbins, and in a leading generalist journal such as the EHR. Robbins concludes that it is a ‘well-balanced survey’, but otherwise has few substantive criticisms to make, positive or negative.

There is one, however, which merits some further discussion here. Robbins writes:

The drawback [of the book’s thematic structure] is that it is difficult to form a sense of how, year on year, each of these topics related to each other in terms of Ramsey’s ordering of their importance and his attention. It is convenient for historians to write about ‘the state’ and ‘the nation’ in different chapters, but so many questions flow across boundaries that their separate treatment seems a little artificial.

Most historians writing a book, I suspect, will have faced the choice between adopting either a chronological structure or a thematic one. My forthcoming book on Walter Hussey adopts a hybrid method: a broadly chronological structure, with some extended analyses of contextual themes interspersed. The adoption of either approach entails gains and losses, as Robbins states. With Hussey, the chronological structure works (I think) because the story has one track: a succession of commissions of works of art for his churches.

In Ramsey’s case, there is no single narrative thread, but several that progress side by side during his time as archbishop. There are points of contact between them, to be sure, which both introduction and conclusion were intended to draw out, perhaps unsuccessfully. But year by year there is not the kind of clustering of attention that Robbins suggests there might be. Instead, there are multiple threads of political, ecumenical and legal development, each of which moves according to its own internal dynamics: fast and slow; some recently arisen and others of very long standing; bursts of activity and long pauses. If one were to order Ramsey’s career as a sequence of events, one would see legislative moves in Parliament, political events overseas, sessions of the Church Assembly, interactions with the media, meetings with the other churches, sometimes in the same week or indeed the same day. Ramsey seems to have been adept at putting disparate matters in their separate boxes in order that they might be dealt with on their own terms. But the day to day experience of the archbishop was one of a rapid succession of highly disparate matters.

Sometimes Ramsey acted on his own initiative in response to events, such as the crises in Southern Rhodesia or Vietnam. In Parliament, sometimes he was able to initiate, and at other terms react, and to try to influence. The process of internal change in the Church is one of commissions, working groups, reports, and the to-and-fro between archbishop, bishops and the periodic deliberations of the Church Assembly or General Synod. Ecumenical change was necessarily a process of both initiative and reaction in relation to other churches at home and abroad. Part of the experience of being archbishop that I wanted to show was the imbalance between the power that he was supposed by many to wield, and the reality of the constraints under which he in fact operated. His power to initiate was considerable, but at the same time more limited than many thought.

The structure of the book was an attempt to isolate some key themes in order that they might be analysed. It may well be possible to achieve the same analytic end in a more chronological way; but it would have required a better writer than me. More pragmatically, the structure of the book more closely serves the needs of most of the readers it may attract. As an author, one might fondly imagine that every reader will want to savour every page of the book, but the majority will come to it in search of material on a particular issue, as Robbins acknowledges. I had no wish to force those readers to work with the index to hew that material out.

Michael Ramsey for the contemporary church: a bishop’s view

I blogged recently about the limits of the responsibility of the historian to work out the theological and ethical implications of recent history for the contemporary church. It was inspired by a disagreement between reviewers of my book on archbishop Michael Ramsey over what contemporary history should be for, and whose purposes it should serve.Ramsey - cover

Now there appears a review of the book from a bishop of the Anglican church (although not the first) which does some of just that work – of applying the book’s conclusions to the contemporary church in the USA and worldwide. It is from R. William Franklin, bishop of Western New York, published in the fall 2016 issue of the Anglican Theological Review. I have little to quibble with over Bishop Franklin’s gloss on the book, and so I quote some of it here. It is also pleasing that he thinks the book a ‘welcome contribution to scholarship …. a valued alternative interpretation’ and the account of the Anglican-Methodist unity scheme ‘masterful’.

For Franklin, Ramsey achieved a synthesis of the sacramentalism of Pusey, the scripturalism of Barth and the socialism of F.D. Maurice in order to ‘define the fundamental shape of the Church as an institution that exists solely to proclaim Christ, and in doing so, to bring about human reconciliation.’ Only a few reviewers so far have focussed on this insight, which (in my mind, at least) was the burden of the whole book. Franklin then goes on to draw out a practical programme:

(i) ‘in mission, to focus on a re-evangelization of the nation;

(ii) ‘in preaching, to give people hope by focussing on the great shape of things to come;

(iii) ‘in ecumenism, to focus on local achievement’

(iv) ‘in liturgical reform, to focus on accessible communication’.

Bishop Franklin connects this programme very directly with the Jesus Movement, outlined by the present presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, which is an intriguing thought. For Franklin, the Anglican church in the USA is in the same process as Ramsey’s Church of England: as I put it, ‘redefining itself, and being redefined, as an increasingly gathered body, learning to act prophetically, to sing the Lord’s song in an increasingly strange land (p.139)

Further reviews of Archbishop Ramsey: the shape of the Church

The reviews of my 2015 book on Michael Ramsey are now appearing thick and fast in the journals, following the usual gap after the initial notices in the press. Mark Dorsett in Modern Believing thought it a ‘fair-minded and judicious book’, while Peter Waddell in Reviews in Religion and Theology thought its central point was ‘developed carefully and persuasively throughout the book, and in the end it is difficult to dissent sharply from’. My thanks are due to both of them. Ramsey - cover

Waddell ends his review by saying:

This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history of the Church of England in the second half of the twentieth century, and in Michael Ramsey especially. It reminds us what a tremendous figure he was.

Waddell also makes what I accept as a fair point, in that while discussing the 1967 reform of the law on abortion, I suggest that no-one foresaw the later rapid rise in the number of terminations in the UK.

A few pages earlier, he notes the Church’s pre-legislation working group acknowledging the concern of ‘traditional moralists’ that the slippery slope towards abortion on demand loomed, before breezily dismissing it with confidence that safeguards would be devised. Had they been heeded, the Church of England’s approach towards the initial 1967 legislation and the subsequent abortion tsunami might have been very different. Might this illumine a wider issue, wherein Ramsey appears a little too ready to accept wider cultural assumptions, especially those shared by the liberal elite which Webster shows was in many ways his natural hinterland? […] Webster is excellent at showing the constraints on an Archbishop of Canterbury, but perhaps we need more theological and ethical reflection on whether the acceptance of those restraints have cost too much.

I draw this out because it raises once again, as several of the other reviews have, the proper role of historical writing. I would certainly want there to be more ethical and theological reflection on the legacy of the long Sixties, but doubt my own capability to produce it – or at least, to produce it as well as a theologian or ethicist would.  There are moments in the book where I allowed myself to flirt with just this kind of editorialising, which were pointed out by one of the historian reviewers. The issue was the subject of this post, on Who is religious history for?

Review of Michael Ramsey book in Theology

Another review of my Michael Ramsey book hit the streets this month, in the journal Theology. For historians who don’t know the theological literature, Theology is one of the foremost general theology periodicals, analogous perhaps to the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for church historians (see the JEH review by Jeremy Bonner).

The review is by Robin Gill, formerly Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent, now professor emeritus in the same, and co-editor of the first significant set of essays assessing Ramsey’s theology, published in 1995. He is also editor of Theology.
Ramsey - cover
Readers without access to the journal will need to pay an astonishing $36 to download a copy – more than the book itself costs in paperback. So, I record some of the highlights. One of the book’s strengths is that it:

adds considerable nuance to the ‘liberal’ positions that Ramsey took on issues such as capital punishment, homosexuality, abortion, divorce and apartheid. What emerges is that Michael Ramsey, despite his other worldly holiness (and, Webster suggests fleetingly, being somewhere on the autistic spectrum), showed clearly through his personal correspondence that he was well aware of competing positions and passions. He was truly a ‘leader’ – one prepared to take a position on contentious moral issues – in a manner that few other Archbishops since William Temple have matched. Despite his critics he was arguably no pawn of the ‘liberal establishment’ of the 1960s.

My sense that Michael Ramsey may well have been autistic has been noted by more than one reviewer. There was not space to expand the thought in the book, but it is explored here.

The reviewer identifies a couple of gaps. First is the influence of the moral theologian Gordon Dunstan, whom the book does not mention. I take this point but add that the book does engage at some length with the report on divorce law reform that Dunstan helped created, Putting Asunder, and much of the thinking on moral theology more generally within the Church of England at the time.

Professor Gill also takes me to task for following too closely the argument of Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod in:

seeing the 1960s as the time of a radical shift of power/influence away from the Church of England and the decisive moment in its numerical decline. But in the process he (and especially Brown) underplays the changes and decline a century earlier that Chadwick analysed so expertly. It is all too easy to dramatize the 1960s and to ignore the traumas of the mid-nineteenth-century Church of England.

To this one would only reply that the book is about the 1960s, and so is hardly the place for an assessment of the whole secularisation story. In any case, I would stand by the argument that the 1960s were indeed a crucial tipping point, but would say that to argue so need not in itself deny the proper significance of the nineteenth century.

All in all, however, Professor Gill concludes:

Yet, despite the gaps, this is a book to relish. For all Michael Ramsey fans this is a must-buy.

This I can accept without cavil or demur. Get your copies now for Christmas.