Rowan Williams Quotes & Sayings

Religion has always been a matter of community building; a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion, fellow feeling and - I dare to use the word - inclusion, which would otherwise be absent from our societies. — Rowan Williams

It takes the whole church to know the whole truth. — Rowan Williams

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This is what the love of God is like: it is free and therefore it is both all-powerful and completely vulnerable. All-powerful because it is always free to overcome, but vulnerable because it has no way of guaranteeing worldly success. The love of God belongs to a different order, not the order of power, manipulation and getting on top, which is the kind of power that pre-occupies us. — Rowan Williams

If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture. — Rowan Williams

Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being. — Rowan Williams

It would be a real failure if agreeing that it [abortion] was not an electoral issue provided an alibi for taking it seriously as a public issue. — Rowan Williams

In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do - not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty. — Rowan Williams

St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return. — Rowan Williams

To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended. What did God intend? He intended that human beings should grow into such love for him and such confidence in him that they could rightly be called God's sons and daughters. Human — Rowan Williams

To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context. — Rowan Williams

To share Eucharistic communion with someone unbaptized, or committed to another story or system, is odd - not because the sacrament is 'profaned', or because grace cannot be given to those outside the household, but because the symbolic integrity of the Eucharist depends upon its being celebrated by those who both commit themselves to the paradigm of Jesus' death and resurrection and acknowledge that their violence is violence offered to Jesus. All their betrayals are to be understood as betrayals of him; and through that understanding comes forgiveness and hope. Those who do not so understand themselves and their sin or their loss will not make the same identification of their victims with Jesus, nor will they necessarily understand their hope for their vocation in relation to him and his community. Their participation is thus anomalous: it is hard to see the meaning of what is being done. — Rowan Williams

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. — Rowan Williams

I have, by God's grace, learned as a member of the Christian community what is the nature of God's mercy, which does not leave me to overcome my sin by my own effort, so I have something to say to the fellow-sufferer who does not know where to look for hope. And what I have to say depends utterly on my willingness not to let go of that awareness of myself that reminds me where I start each day - not as a finished saint but as a needy person still struggling to grow. — Rowan Williams

Nobody ... likes talking about enforceable international protocols and yet unless there is a real change in attitude, we have to contemplate those very unwelcome possibilities if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions, of people to die. — Rowan Williams

It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity. — Rowan Williams

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism. — Rowan Williams

The past is what the present is doing now. — Rowan Williams

I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.. I have reached this definitive conclusion after 20 years of study and prayer. — Rowan Williams

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good. — Rowan Williams

I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith. — Rowan Williams

Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety. — Rowan Williams

The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't. — Rowan Williams

A doctrine like that of the Trinity tells us that the very life of God is a yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other, a 'negation' in the sense of refusing to settle for the idea that normative life or personal identity is to be conceived in terms of self-enclosed and self-sufficient units. The negative is associated with the 'ek-static', the discovery of identity in self-transcending relation. And accordingly, theology itself has to speak in a mode that encourages us to question ourselves, to deny ourselves, in the sense of denying systems and concepts that are the comfortable possession of individual minds. — Rowan Williams

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share ... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears. — Rowan Williams

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old. — Rowan Williams

It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please. — Rowan Williams

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation. — Rowan Williams

In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention. — Rowan Williams

We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves. — Rowan Williams

Two hermits lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said to the other, "Let's have a quarrel with each other, as other men do." The other answered, "I don't know how a quarrel happens." The first said, "Look here, I put a brick between us, and I say, 'That's mine.' Then you say, 'No, it's mine.' That is how you begin a quarrel." So they put a brick between them and one of them said, "That's mine." The other said, "No, it's mine." He answered, "Yes, it's yours. Take it away." They were unable to argue with each other. — Rowan Williams

I value unity because I believe we learn truth from each other in this process. — Rowan Williams

[Knowing God] ... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither ... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications ... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations ... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away ... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth ... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth.. — Rowan Williams

The Reformation was an attempt to put the Bible at the heart of the Church again
not to give it into the hands of private readers. The Bible was to be seen as a public document, the charter of the Church's life; all believers should have access to it because all would need to know the common language of the Church and the standards by which the Church argued about theology and behaviour. The huge Bibles that were chained up in English churches in the sixteenth century were there as a sign of this. It was only as the rapid development of cheap printing advanced that the Bible as a single affordable volume came to be within everyone's reach as something for individuals to possess and study in private. The leaders of the Reformation would have been surprised to be associated with any move to encourage anyone and everyone to form their own conclusions about the Bible. For them, it was once again a text to be struggled with in the context of prayer and shared reflection. — Rowan Williams

We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will 'tolerate' us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints. — Rowan Williams

I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church. — Rowan Williams

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society. — Rowan Williams

Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners. — Rowan Williams

The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can't leave, you are in effect a captive. — Rowan Williams

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. — Rowan Williams

Even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, 'One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people'. — Rowan Williams

admire the ingenuity that goes into this but I am not at all convinced that such people have quite got the right end of the stick. Does God really want us to know, in exact detail, ancient Babylonian history? I suspect not. But I am confident that God does want us to know how people in circumstances of acute displacement, living with the fear and the anxiety of a persecuted minority, responded to a hostile state and a pagan power. — Rowan Williams

The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world. — Rowan Williams

By affirming that all 'meaning,' every assertion about the significance of life and reality, must be judged by reference to a brief succession of contingent events in Palestine, Christianity - almost without realizing it - closed off the path to 'timeless truth.' That is to say, it becomes increasingly difficult in the Christian world to see the ultimately important human experience as an escape into the transcendent, a flight out of history and the flesh. There is a demand for the affirmation of history, and thus of human change and growth, as significant. If the heart of 'meaning' is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story with all it's oddity and ambivalence becomes open to interpretation in terms of God's redemptive work. — Rowan Williams

The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament. — Rowan Williams

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation. — Rowan Williams

The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness — Rowan Williams

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience. — Rowan Williams

Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. I can see the temptation of simply thinking, 'Well, there's a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it'. And that really won't do. — Rowan Williams

Only the body saves the soul. — Rowan Williams

I am pleased that Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles have decided to take this important step. — Rowan Williams

To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty. — Rowan Williams

Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: 'If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.' To be baptized into Jesus is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus' first disciples discovered that in the Gospels, and his disciples have gone on discovering it ever since. — Rowan Williams

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign. — Rowan Williams

In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that. — Rowan Williams

Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest. — Rowan Williams

Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable. — Rowan Williams

A public is a necessary fiction. — Rowan Williams

The new humanity that is created around Jesus is not a humanity that is always going to be successful and in control of things, but a humanity that can reach out its hand from the depths of chaos, to be touched by the hand of God. — Rowan Williams

Let's cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don't think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I've made mistakes - that's probably one of them. — Rowan Williams

To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations. — Rowan Williams

At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen. — Rowan Williams

Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community. — Rowan Williams

As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself. — Rowan Williams

Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, 'What does God want to tell us?' If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of 'magic' book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, 'the lively oracles of God'. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation. — Rowan Williams

[T]here is no goodness that is not bodily and realistic and local. — Rowan Williams

In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied. — Rowan Williams

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing. — Rowan Williams

We are called to show utter commitment to the God who is revealed in Jesus and to all those to whom His invitation is addressed. — Rowan Williams

And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm. — Rowan Williams

One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest. — Rowan Williams

A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us. — Rowan Williams

Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication. — Rowan Williams

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation. — Rowan Williams

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow. — Rowan Williams

Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm. — Rowan Williams

The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny. — Rowan Williams

My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome. — Rowan Williams

Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God. — Rowan Williams

I have to go on being a priest and bishop, that is, to celebrate God and what God has done in Jesus, and to offer in God's name whatever I can discern of God's perspective on the world around - something which involves both challenge and comfort. — Rowan Williams

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order. — Rowan Williams

A hermit said, "Do not judge an adulterer if you are chaste or you will break the law of God just as much as he does. For he who said 'Do not commit adultery' also said 'Do not judge. — Rowan Williams

The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's. — Rowan Williams

the love of God is the kind of love that identifies with the powerless; the kind of love that appeals to nothing but its own integrity, that doesn't seek to force or batter its way through. It lives, it survives, it 'wins' simply by being itself. On the cross, God's love just is what it is and it's valid and world-changing and earth-shattering, even though at that moment what it means in the world's terms is failure, terror and death. — Rowan Williams

How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us? — Rowan Williams