There’s a major article in the current New Yorker on the Archbishop of Canterbury by Jane Kramer. It focuses on the struggles within the Church of England over the ordination of women. The Episcopal Church has ordained women to the priesthood since 1976, and the first woman ordained bishop was Barbara Harris, ordained to the episcopacy in the Diocese of Massachusetts in the late 1980s. The Church of England has been much slower. Ordination of women to the priesthood only became possible in 1994. The article focuses on the current struggle over ordination of woman as bishops. There have been ongoing attempts in the past few years to draft legislation that would make it possible for women bishops, all the while providing room for those who are opposed to it.

One of the reasons for the struggle is the very different religious landscape within the Church of England. Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical wings are strong and well-financed, and well-organized, and threaten withdrawal if they don’t get their way. In fact, many believe that the Pope’s overtures last year to welcome disaffected Anglicans was a thinly-veiled attempt to intervene in the CoE’s internal debates. Of course, things have changed dramatically since last fall, and for the time being reunion with Rome is probably less popular an option for Anglo-Catholics than ever.

It’s a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Williams, who is a theological giant and a deeply spiritual man, caught by the tides of history, both within his national church and in the Anglican Communion. Kramer quotes historians like Diarmaid MacCullogh to put his historical position in some context and the concluding paragraph sums it all up:

It may be that Williams’s ideas have changed, but in all likelihood it is simply that his job has changed. The women urging him on now are really trying to remind him that, however broad his concern and compassion necessarily are, he is also the Primate of a Western country where women priests—as well as a good number of openly gay priests—have played an impressive role in revitalizing Christian practice and, one would have to say, the Christian imagination. When he talks to them about restraint and patience—about the fullness of time and the “positive side to Anglican diffuseness and slowness of decision-making” and his own anguish “trying to counsel patience to people who are suffering more than you are”—they say, as many of them did to me: The fullness of time is fine, but it’s God’s time. We are living now.

Of course, the conflicts in Anglicanism over homosexuality also play a role in the conflict within the Church of England, although the contours of the battleground are somewhat different. And what happens in the Episcopal Church also looms large. It’s pretty clear one of Williams’ main goals, perhaps his highest priority, is to keep the conversation going, to prevent the final act of schism that would mean the formation of new denominations. Whether that’s possible isn’t at all clear.  One sign of the intractability of the positions is a quotation in the article from a leader of the Anglo-Catholic wing, who referred to our presiding bishop as a laywoman.

Kramer compares Williams to President Obama at one point, saying that both rely on reason to bring people together. The obvious inference is that Williams, like Obama, may have to give up finally on accommodating the various sides and push through the necessary changes. I don’t think that’s an apt analogy. I suspect the better clue to Williams’ self-understanding is the observation he makes about conflict within Christianity in the fourth century. Williams is a historian and can contextualize his current situation. But historians also can occasionally be burdened by the power of history and the weight of tradition.

Before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams explored disestablishment of the Church of England, which would have been a clean break with the past. It might be time to consider it again.