Answering The Call of God

By DAVID AIKMAN/LONDON George Carey

Q. You once said, "I've never found it easy to believe in God." Why not? Has belief come easier over the years?

A. I can identify with many people's struggles with notions of faith. When you look at a world such as this and you see, for example, the Holocaust, this is where I identify with many of my Jewish friends, when 6 million Jews perished and probably at least that number again of Christians and Russians and others who died. Now, they must have said their prayers, and yet God didn't deliver them. There are no glib answers to that sort of thing. Having said that, I think the intellectual grounds for God and for the vitality and reality of the Christian faith are strong.

Is belief getting easier? Well, yes, I think it is. Simply because, over the years, for me personally there have been many, many indications of God's presence in the world, personal happenings where I've been convinced of his reality and answered prayer in all kinds of ways which I couldn't quantify.

Q. What does being a Christian mean to you?

A. First of all, it is a personal allegiance to a historical figure, Jesus Christ. It means believing in him and following his life-style, his person. For me, Christianity is a way of life. It is to be holy, a spiritual person for whom that spirituality takes a primary role in anything I do and anything I say. I think that is authentic Christianity. It's the kind of thing that led the first Christians to the stake.

Q. You have described a deep experience at the age of 17. What happened?

A. I'd been brought up in a working-class family in the East End of London, bombed out in the war, moved to our home in Essex, was a deep-thinking young man searching for something, was taken along to a local Anglican church and then found through the fellowship there the beginning of answers to some questions. I felt the reality of the Christian faith beginning then, and, no doubt about it, it was the beginning of a very deep and meaningful experience. It was a real encounter with the living God.

Q. Was there a lasting change in your personality or your ambitions as a result of that?

A. I suppose it is true to say that the experience was so real to me that there was a moral change, no question about that. My family was solidly working class, and my mother and father were deeply intelligent. They actually made the journey into the Christian faith later, after I did, and we were able to argue and discuss it together and so on. But meeting Christ also meant that I met education, and it had a very profound influence on my discovering the richness of life. I've said that at the age of 17 1/2, I discovered the letter h in the English language, which, you know, isn't much known among the English working class. Now that's not to be elitist about it, but that was a reality.

Q. Many people believe that all religions point in some way to God or at least to the idea of God. Why should people in a pluralistic world today prefer Christianity to other faiths?

A. Well, I think many -- not all -- religions do point to God. Whether all religions lead to God is a different matter altogether, and, again, one has got to say within the Christian tradition that they don't all lead to God, that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life. I stand with that. The kind of people, however, who say that all religions lead to God are generally the ones who want to avoid any way of getting to God. In other words, they want to sit on the fence themselves.

Q. You have said that Christians should not proselytize adherents of other religions. How do you reconcile that with your statement that Christians "are under a historic mandate to proclaim their faith to all people"?

A. I think there is a great difference between proselytizing and evangelizing. Evangelizing is a portrayal of the person of Jesus Christ while sensitively listening to the views of other people, taking into account where other people are at, affirming where they are. Proselytizing is the arrogant assumption that the other person has nothing to offer to a debate. There is no dialogue in proselytizing. It is a kind of cowboys-and-Indians approach to another person that robs him of his dignity. Responsible evangelism always listens to the culture of a person.

Q. What is your perspective on Jews and Judaism?

A. Well, my perspective is that if you look at Romans, chapters 9 to 11, you will see that we could not be Christians today were it not for the Jews, and we owe so much to them, to the Old Testament, the life of the Torah, the Prophets. They gave us the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The difference between us, when we're agreed about so much, is Christology. I'd want to say, well, I have been captivated by this person, Jesus Christ, the onus is upon me to share him with all people, Jews and other people. But in the eyes of Christians, Jews are always in a very special relationship with God.

Q. Do you favor the admission of women to every rank in the Anglican priesthood?

A. I see no reason why not. My theological starting point would be from the fact that I believe that biblically, if you work this out from a theology of baptism, if you work it out from the theology of the Spirit's gifts to his people, to women as well, the evidence leads me to see the ordination of women to the priesthood as something quite logical that follows from a woman as an equal in the sight of God. I can understand from the Roman Catholic side that the argument from tradition is a very important one. Women have not been in the ordained ministry for nearly 2,000 years, so this is a novel thing. Against that, I would argue that it took the church 1,825 years to come to terms with slavery and overrule it.

Q. How do you balance this view against your desire to improve relations with Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox Church, both of which oppose women's ordination?

A. I don't think we must ever sacrifice the truth of Christianity for the peace of Christians, so I believe that's terribly important for me. I long for peace, I long for unity. I believe that it is at the very heart of our mission. But all our churches are not yet united, and yet the question of women's ordination has been put. Why should we subordinate ourselves to the views of other churches with whom we are not yet in unity? Rome has never sought Anglican advice on any changes it made; neither did the Orthodox communion seek Roman Catholic advice. We're looking for the things that draw us together, and there is so much. That creates the greater pain, doesn't it?

Q. Many priests within the Anglican tradition have abandoned whole areas of historical Christian faith. Do you think there should be minimal criteria of belief for admission to the Anglican clergy?

+ A. We already have it, actually, in that whenever I ordain or a bishop ordains, we read out the statements "Do you believe that the Bible contains all things necessary for salvation? Will you accept the doctrine of the Church of England? Will you obey the bishop?" And so on. People know they are actually going along with the whole package, which includes the trustworthiness of the Bible, its centrality in terms of authority and tradition and reason. So we can't really pick and choose.

Q. What is your position on ordaining avowed, practicing homosexuals?

A. Now I know some people have called me homophobic. In fact, I'm far from that. I've ordained homosexuals, but I think we've all got to understand that the Bible is consistently against practicing homosexuality, and therefore I would have to say, probably with the majority of bishops and probably the majority of Christians in the Church of England, that we see no way of going against that tradition.

Q. Do you see your role as requiring you to speak out at times in criticism of the government?

A. I hope I will have the faithfulness of my calling to be prepared to do that if I ever felt that our government and nation were either reneging on Christian values and commitment to the poor and helpless or acting in such a way that they were denying Christian truth. I have a very close relationship with the Prime Minister ((John Major)) and the ministers of government. We talk a lot to the Foreign Office about our hostages in Lebanon and about other things because the Anglican Communion is very much an international body. We are actually more international than the British government. We've lost our empire, the Commonwealth is in name only, but the Anglican Communion has more than 32 countries, so we've got all these links.

Q. What do you hope to accomplish as Archbishop?

A. I want to demystify the term evangelism and address the urgent need of being a relevant church in a needy world. We have to face the fact that for 150 years, the Church of England hasn't really come to grips with the culture of its day, hasn't addressed the central issues. We've actually plodded along very nicely. We've used our position well, I believe, in society. But we've been bleeding to death, and that is a very urgent issue we've got to face up to. It presents all kinds of challenges to us today. If we ended up being a smaller church but much more open and confident of doing good things, I would have felt we had achieved something very real indeed.

Q. You once described the Anglican Church as "an old lady muttering platitudes through teethless gums." What image would you like it to project?

A. I think the image that I'd like to see is the picture in the Gospel of John, chapter 13, of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. I think the church has got to take the form of a servant in stooping and sharing, in caring action. The person whose feet we are washing? Well, it could be the homosexual, it could be the starving poor. It could be the very rich man who has no need of God. So the church has got to be the servant of all, and if it is, then it will be the kind of church I would be proud to belong to.